Geartooth
by EndoplasmicPanda
Summary: The Shiro they rescue in the desert the night before everything goes to shit isn't the Shiro Keith remembers. (Or: It takes a lot more than a rip in space, an armada of the universe's most menacing villains on his tail, and ten years of rewritten time to keep Shiro from protecting the only friends he's ever truly had.) Time travel AU.
1. Shiro

Shiro wakes from the dead and finds heaven in a pair of violet eyes.

"Hey," Keith murmurs, blinking once, twice. The corners of his lips twist upwards in a quiet smile. "Welcome back."

For a moment, Shiro's heart shatters, eyes blown wide, and he thinks he's staring into the void of his soul, the space that was sucked out by the black hole. He thinks he's dreaming, thinks he's thrashing about in a hellish Galra nightmare. But then Keith is pulling back, leaning on his haunches, looking over his shoulder and calling across the dusty desert shack towards the partially open door.

Shiro recognizes where he is and, just as soon, doesn't want to.

Heaven collapses.

 _It's a memory,_ Shiro thinks, because that's all he _can_ think, and the similarity between this moment and one from ten years in the past is too nauseating to reflect on.

"He's up," Keith calls, voice leveled and betraying no emotion.

Shiro takes a breath, holds it in, drags his eyes across the room.

There's a lizard on the wall, slinking between cracks in the wooden panels and behind the slew of posters that are tacked up in lazy, asymmetric patterns. String connects pins over an expansive regional map, ghosting across the room like Light Bikes from the old Tron arcade game. Old boxes of cup ramen are stacked crookedly in the corner like LEGO. A pair of empty containers sit on the low table between them, accompanied by a nondescript plastic water bottle. It's half empty.

 _For me,_ he thinks. Confusion wrings him dry, sends his heart into overdrive.

He bolts upright, looks up at the ceiling, the window-laden wall behind him, the door to his right that cracks open from the outside. He expects at any moment to see the Black Lion there again, all sleek lines and sharp edges, glass and metal, reminding him it was just a dream, _just a dream_ , none of this was real—

"Shiro?" Keith asks, and his voice is small, confused.

The door pushes open, and Hunk steps inside.

He's alive. He's young, and cleanshaven, and a little overweight from his garrison days, and _alive._

Shiro's heart seizes in his chest. He lets out a huff of air, draining his lungs.

Hunk steps inside, curiosity bleeding to surprise bleeding to alarm. "I think… he's having a panic attack, Keith—"

"A panic attack?" Lance says, eyes wide, following close behind. Pidge is on his tail, peeking out from behind the shadow of his jacket, arms laden with miscellaneous computer equipment.

They look the same. Intact. Whole. _Young._

 _Not real not real not REAL NOT REAL—_

Pidge sighs and drops everything in an unceremonious pile on the table between them, walks _over_ it, leans into Shiro's personal space and taps the side of his face with the back of her hand.

"Hey," she murmurs, looking at him over the frame of her glasses. "Breathe. It's okay. You're alright. Deep breaths. Come on; one, two, three."

Shiro's vision fades to a pinprick. Her hands are blurred and smooth as they reach forward and hold his face between her palms, caught in a slow motion camera. She's mimicking the motions, sucking air through her mouth and letting out in a slow puff from her nose.

Breathe. He can do that.

He does.

The world returns to him in a high-pitched scream; the ringing in his ears fades with each slowing pump of his racing heart, each hasty swallow of a dry mouth. He lets out a shaky, empty cough, reaches across Pidge's scrawny shoulder towards the water.

"Water?" Keith guesses, watching him move. He grabs the bottle and forces it into Shiro's hand, wrapping his fingers around it until he's satisfied Shiro has a decent grip on it himself.

He drinks. It slides down his throat like water bleeding through the cracks in sun-scorched earth, but it helps.

"Shiro," Pidge says, leaning into his space again. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"I…"

He starts, tries to form words, but fails, heart picking up pace again when a new thought slides through his mind and wreaks havoc on his emotions.

 _Trap. Galra trap. Galra mind trick. Trap trap trap TRAP—_

"No," he breathes, flaring his nostrils, eyes sharp and wide as saucers.

"Get back," Pidge manages. "He's panicking again."

But Shiro is already up, reaching past Pidge, grabbing towards Keith, who stands there, surprised, eyebrows knotted across his forehead. He steps to the side at the last moment, and Shiro topples over, crashing into the coffee table and clamoring to the ground, the metal prosthetic of his right arm slamming against a ceramic plate and shattering it into a thousand gravity-defying pieces.

He rolls. The motion is familiar; suddenly, he's back on the flight deck of Zarkon's battleship, ducking through the hole his lion tore through one side and leaping towards the similar-sized gash on the other end, slashing through sentries at the ankles and watching their bodies separate and get sucked into the vacuum of space.

But this time, he's not in his armor. He's not in his lion, and he's not in space.

His fingers – his normal, actual, _human_ fingers wrap around the hilt of Keith's knife. Shiro's memory of it burns into his skin, twists at his mind and tugs until it's sprung tight and let loose on his brain like a rubber band. He ignores it, ignores the pain.

"Hey, whoa, careful!" Lance belts again, leaping away, back colliding with the wall of the shack. Hunk is standing beside him, arms brought up against his chest, spine straight and eyes wide. Pidge is returning to her feet from where Shiro cast her aside in his movement. Keith is spinning around and falling into a comfortable fighting stance.

His eyes widen when he sees what Shiro is carrying, and his hand reaches behind him to the sheath on his belt. It's empty, and he snarls.

"Give that back," he says.

"Keith," Lance tries, looking back and forth, back and forth from Shiro to the rear of Keith's head. "We talked about this. There was a chance this might have happened."

"I'm not leaving him alone like this," he bites out. His eyes are still locked on Shiro's.

"He's in a fight or flight mode right now," Pidge says, a step behind him.

"Then I'll fight him." He curls his hands into a fist around his gloves.

"We need to leave him be until he calms down." She lowers her voice. "Give him space."

Keith narrows his eyes. "Do you really think that'd work?"

"It works for you," Lance says. He side-eyes the shack they're in. "Obviously."

"Not the time, Lance," Pidge bites out. She takes a step forward, but freezes when Keith glares at her.

"Shut up," Shiro mutters. He doesn't mean for it to slip out of his mouth, but it's a thought screamed so loudly within the confines of his head that he can't help it.

"What?" Keith asks, leaning closer.

This time, Shiro lets it out, full-force. "Shut up!"

He jumps to his feet, ignores the feeling of the ceramic shards tearing the skin of his knee underneath his clothing. Keith's knife – the damn knife – switches from one hand to the other. He holds it by the edge, and the synthetic nervous system in the palm of his prosthetic tickles in fake pain.

Keith watches the blade with wide eyes. "Shiro…"

The room is suffocating. It's hot – _why is it so hot?_ – and loud and crowded and _claustrophobic_. The walls are shrinking in on him, pulled towards him like strings on a marionette. Each heartbeat sends them another inch closer, another inch closer, another inch closer—

Keith is letting out strangled, pained gasp, and rushes towards him the next instant. He takes two steps forward, but suddenly the room is pulling _away_ from them now; he doesn't seem to be moving. Shiro frowns, confused, his mind growing foggy and delirious.

"Shiro, let it go! Stop!"

He blinks once, then twice, looks up and sees Keith scrambling to pry Shiro's hands off his blade.

He blinks again. The rest of the paladins are on him now – Hunk is forcing his other arm to the ground, Lance is helping Keith, and Pidge is bolting around all three of them, disappearing from Shiro's view.

The last thing he sees before Pidge covers his eyes with her arms and starts whispering calming words into his ears is his arm going limp, Keith unwrapping his hand, and the blade, bent and ragged and crushed under the weight of his grip, toppling to the floor in a crumpled heap.

* * *

The next time Shiro wakes, it's evening.

He blinks, frowns, groans when his head reminds him he's alive with a dull, throbbing ache that won't go away no matter how many times he slams his eyes shut. He almost would rather be dead, but in a way, he's not entirely convinced he _isn't_. He saw hell in the eyes of the Galra druids – what was a little more mental trauma?

He tries to run a hand through his hair, wipe some of the grimy sweat from his forehead, but his arms are restrained, tied back with tight rope that wraps underneath the flimsy cot to somewhere he can't quite see.

"I'm sorry."

Shiro freezes. He whips his head around, surprised, but he can't find it in himself to care anymore. His panicked response earlier in the day was the last ounce of energy he had left.

His shoulders sink when he sees Pidge sitting backwards on a flimsy wooden chair, arms propped up on the back and legs tucked up underneath herself.

He tries to speak, realizes it's not happening when his dry throat seizes up and leaves him coughing and gasping for breath. He looks around for a bottle of water, sees the same one from earlier sitting on the dented tabletop, and stares at it, panting.

Rather than help like before, Pidge just watches.

Shiro licks his lips, waits a moment for his mouth to unwind. "Why?" he manages.

"Why am I sorry? Because of all this," she says, waving her hand at the restraints. "But I'm sure you understand why they were necessary."

Shiro pauses, bites his lip, shrugs. "Yeah," he says. "You should have done it the first time, too."

Pidge gives him a sad, knowing smile. "Can you really fault us for having hope?"

Shiro sighs, falls back onto the cot, lets his head burrow into the soft fabric of whatever his makeshift pillow was. He turns his head and sees a strip of olive green – Lance's jacket.

"I haven't seen this thing in years," he murmurs, frowning. "Convincing, too. Although it doesn't smell enough like B.O. and interstellar body wash."

If Pidge has a response, she doesn't say it.

He lays there, still, and watches the fluttering of a curtain down by his feet. The window is open, pulled up and ignored. The stars outside are bright and vibrant; they cast dull shadows of light over his bed and onto the dusty, unswept floor.

"Keith doesn't think you're the real Shiro."

He freezes.

"He what?" Shiro asks, rolling over so he's facing Pidge again. Her eyes aren't on him anymore; instead, they're burrowing a hole into the leg of the couch just underneath his face.

"He thinks you're an impostor," Pidge shrugs, her mouth burrowing into the sleeve of her jacket. "He's really mad, you know."

"I don't see why he wouldn't be," Shiro mutters. "I'm mad, too."

"Why are you mad?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.

He turns, looks at her, passes along his most serious stare. "Because I just want to die. Not play any of these games."

Pidge winces and looks away. "That's… harsh."

Shiro sighs and looks back up at the ceiling again. "It's the truth. I'm tired. I'm tired of all of this, and I'm tired of being helpless."

"Now I know you're not the real Shiro," Pidge mutters. "Everything I've heard about the real Shiro tells me he wouldn't give up so easily."

"I'm the real Shiro," he says, closing his eyes. "I'm just not the one you may know."

 _The same way you're not the real Pidge._

They sit in silence. Shiro dozes, content with not being probed or tortured or any number of the… _other_ colorful things the Galra could be doing to him at that moment. He appreciates the rest, regardless of how short-lived it may be, and lets himself relax.

His Galra imprisoners seemed to be feeling kind at the moment, and Shiro wasn't in any mood to test his luck.

* * *

He wakes to the sound of more voices, speaking quietly just above him. He listens, careful not to change his breathing or move more than necessary.

"Should we really be doing this?"

"What, holding him down like this? You saw what he tried to do earlier. We can't take any chances, Hunk."

"Yeah, but Lance… this is _the_ Takashi Shirogane. Like, the biggest, baddest pilot the Garrison ever managed to produce." A pause. "I don't know, man. Seeing him so… broken like this is just sad. And demoralizing."

Something in Shiro's heart cracks. He ignores it. This was the torture, it seemed. Not the physical pain but the emotional.

Pidge's voice breaks in. "He's still in there somewhere. I know it. But I don't know how far deep."

"I don't blame him, honestly," Lance mutters, sighing, letting himself settle down on the table toward Shiro's feet. "I mean, look at his _arm_. Have you ever seen a prosthetic that advanced before? And all those scars, and the _hair_ …"

Shiro fought back the urge to frown. _What?_

"What are you trying to say, Lance?" Hunk asked.

"I mean… isn't it obvious?"

"I'll say it," Pidge butts in bluntly. "Aliens. Aliens got to Shiro."

Shiro lets in a confused breath before he can catch himself, and he holds still, expecting one of them to slap him awake and string him to the wall, but instead, the wood in the door creaks open and he can hear the three impostors at his bedside turn and look away.

"What's going on?"

Shiro's gut clenches again.

"We're just trying to figure out what to do with Cyborg here," Hunk says.

Keith lets the door slam behind him, takes a few steps into the room, begins to pace along the far wall.

"Uhh, buddy?" Lance asks. "You ever going to explain what's going on? Why you knew Shiro was going to show up in the first place?"

Silence. Keith sighed, clicked his tongue and grunted. "See that?"

Lance moved across the room towards the sound of Keith's voice. "I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, but alright."

"Looks like the X-Files in here," Hunk mutters.

Keith rustles a series of papers on the table in front of him, and launches into a complicated story of sleepless nights, bizarre feelings at the back of his mind, and a pull – a tug towards a hole in the ground half a mile to the west.

"I keep seeing this word," Keith says. "' _Voltron'._ "

Shiro sits perfectly still.

This was it. He knew it.

"That's what I kept hearing on my sensors!" Pidge says, excited. "Voltron. What does it mean?"

 _It's bait, Shiro. They captured you, have the Black Lion, and now they're using your memories to find where the others went_.

He lets a small vindictive smile grace his lips. _It's a shame they haven't realized Voltron's dead._

"Wait," Hunk says, and Shiro lets his expression drop again, careful not to move. But when the sound of Hunk's heavy footsteps trend away from him rather than in his direction, he relaxes into the cot again. "What are those?"

"Data readings," Keith says. "It's the pattern I picked up when I scanned the area. Have no idea what it means, though."

"Fraunhofer lines," Hunk mutters, and Shiro's mind melts.

 _What_.

"What?" Lance seems to say for him.

"They look like Fraunhofer lines," Hunk says again. "You know, the way they found out what the sun was made out of back in the day? It tells you the chemical composition of something based on its emissions spectrum."

Silence.

"I bet this is what this Voltron thing is made of. If we use your radio, Pidge, I might be able to set something up so we can look for it." He sounds proud of himself. "Kind of like a Voltron Geiger counter."

"Huh," Pidge says. "I never thought of that. Way to go, Hunk."

"Yeah, well, I try."

It was as if a memory was playing out from just beyond Shiro's closed eyelids. Everything – down to Hunk's bizarre method of detection – was the way he remembered it.

A test. There was no other explanation. The Galra were running his mind through its paces. They'd exhausted everything else, torn through his body and ripped him apart on the operating table far more times than he was comfortable admitting.

But his mind? His mind was still his. And he was satisfied he had died with it intact when he flew his lion into the heart of a black hole.

He resists the urge to groan. Nothing was as simple as it should have been.

"We need to get going," Keith says, and he turns towards the door. Shiro remembers where he is, who he's with, and winces.

Then there's a body above him. He can feel the air shift, can feel the way the light on his eyelids dips and disappears.

Something's tugging at his restraints.

"Whoa, Keith," Hunk says, "what are you doing? He's dangerous."

"He's not the Shiro you remember, Keith," Pidge says.

Keith huffs above him, reaching over Shiro's chest to cut at the knot. "You don't know him," he murmurs.

"He destroyed your knife," Lance demands, voice high and absurd. "You cared more about that thing than most people! Why are you letting him off the hook so easily?"

"Because he's not a threat," Keith states, as if it's not the first time he's had to make this argument, and Shiro remembers, vaguely, that it's not.

He also remembers that these aren't his teammates. _Don't get attached. Don't let them get you, Shiro._

The knot snaps, and Shiro's eyes blast open.

He's moving before Keith can react. Keith grunts in surprise when Shiro catches him by his waist, flings him across the room, and pins him against the wall. His synthetic arm pries the bent and battered Marmora knife from Keith's hand, brings it up to his neck, and holds it there, letting the skin around Keith's Adam's apple dip against the metal with each of his shaky breaths.

"God damn it—" Lance yelps, flying across the room. The others move in tandem, bolting through the tiny shack, Hunk already reaching out to grab Shiro's prosthetic and Lance moving towards his neck.

"Stop!"

They freeze.

"Keith?" Lance says, quiet.

"Just… let me handle this," Keith grits out. The edge of the knife cuts into his neck, and he winces.

"Who are you," Shiro bites, "and who do you work for?"

Keith's eyes fall open, turn to stare at him from where his head is smashed against the wall. "What?"

"Are you Marmora?" he says. "Zarkon? Some sort of Galra mercenary?"

"Did you just say Galra?" Pidge asks. "I heard that on the radio too."

"Shiro," Keith murmurs, color draining from his face, "do you not remember me?"

Shiro's eyes are fading again, prickling on the edges like the shattering of dying suns. He lets out a shaky breath, holds his lungs empty, relishes in the feeling of drowning among the stars.

"He's panicking again," Pidge says. "Keith…"

Keith's face steels, and he burrows a glare into Shiro's eyes. He sucks in a careful breath, winces when the twisted edges of his knife draw blood from a sliver in his skin.

"Do it," he says.

Shiro falters. "What?"

"Keith!" Lance says from behind them. Hunk pulls him aside.

Keith leans into the blade. Blood trickles down the edge. It runs across the handle, pools in a tiny puddle around Shiro's white knuckles.

" _Do it_ ," Keith repeats, and there's a fire in his eyes.

Shiro sees red, and it's not from the blood, and it's not from the stare. The red lion is there, zooming past him, eclipsing the black lion's cockpit from the light of the nearby star. A Galra fleet twenty times larger than any they had ever encountered looms ahead, and it's just him and Keith and Lance, careening through space, a helpless planet behind them.

The red lion disappears.

Shiro opens his eyes.

The world is blurry; he blinks, forcing aside the haze. Keith is still there, pressed against the wall, staring at him, eyes wide. He looks afraid, but not for himself.

"Do it," he mutters again, but it holds no fire, no emotion. Just a statement. Just a plea. It hits him like dull roar, and it isn't the first time static has taken the place of Keith's voice.

Shiro's hand shakes. The blade slips from Keith's throat, just a bit, and he lets out a breath.

"No," Shiro says. It's quiet, but there, allowed to fester in the air between them.

He can handle losing an arm. He can handle the gash on his face, can handle the ghostly glow of his white hair late at night when the stars are all that's left. He can handle the pain.

He can't handle losing Keith.

The knife slips from his fingers, handle catching on the fabric of his torn, tattered clothing. It clatters to the ground with a dull thud.

Shiro turns his eyes away, steps back, can't bring himself to look up. This was where the torture would begin; the Galra pretending to be Keith would shift back into a druid, and it would stretch out its long, spindly, pale arms towards his throat and do the job he couldn't bear to do himself.

So he sits and waits. Stands there, quiet, not bothering to put up a fight. The Galra won, but he wasn't going to make it any more embarrassing for himself.

"Keith," Lance murmurs.

Shiro turns, just barely, and looks – the boy's face is as pale as moonlight, eyes saucers and nostrils flaring with each heavy pant of anxious breath.

Hunk stands next to him, eyebrows knotted across his forehead, mouth a fine line. He takes a step forward, stops, bites his lip.

Pidge is off to the side. Her arms are crossed, but her face is stoic and emotionless; a mask of faux indifference.

They're normal. They're human. They're _afraid._

A thought crosses through Shiro's mind, and his gut responds by twisting around his spine and spiraling up his throat. It's the one thing he's kept himself from thinking since he woke up here, the one thing he can't bear to put into words until he has no other choice.

Maybe they're real.

Shiro staggers, takes a shaky step to the side, barely manages to keep his knees from buckling. The couch is right next to him, but it may as well be miles. He stumbles, falls onto it, lets the connection beat the air out of his lungs. His face presses into the faded upholstery.

"Shiro?" Keith asks. One question carries on its back a thousand others, and Shiro can't. He can't think about it.

He assumed that when he fell into the black hole, Zarkon's ship framed by the wide windows of the black lion's cockpit, he would wake up dead or wouldn't wake up at all. The black lion was better destroyed than in the enemy's hands, and so Shiro had made the ultimate sacrifice, pulling back the joysticks and letting the tug of gravity finish the job.

He'd closed his eyes, relished in the feeling of rage he felt through his lion's shared connection with Zarkon, and smiled.

And woke up here.

"You're all dead," Shiro says, finally, voice cracking mid-sentence and coming out in a whisper instead. "Or missing. Or both."

Silence. Keith is settling against the wall, rubbing his neck with a gloved hand and letting his head droop, hair covering his eyes like the veil of a bride.

"Shiro, whatever happened to you out there," Pidge says, "it's over now. You're safe. Please."

He shakes his head, lets it fall backwards. "If you really are Galra," he says, "then just end it."

"We're not…" Pidge sighs, growls through her clenched teeth. "Would you two stop trying to get yourselves killed for _one second_ and actually use your brains?"

The room falls quiet again. Shiro doesn't move. He can feel the starlight on his shoulders, feel the weight it presses into his skin.

A roar cuts through his mind.

Hunk yelps. Lance jumps. Keith winces. Pidge blinks, eyes wide behind the frames of her glasses, and frowns.

"Was I the only one that heard that?" Hunk mutters. "Please tell me I wasn't the only one that heard that."

The blue lion. Shiro's heart stops, starts, stammers along at the beat of a stalling engine.

"It sounded like a cat," Lance murmurs.

Pidge moves a hand to her face, scratches an itch on her cheek, eyebrows pressed past her hairline. "What _was_ that?"

The blue lion. It was on Earth. That wasn't possible – unless…

"That," Keith says, dusting off his pants and walking toward the door, "is what I've been trying to figure out."

Shiro leans forward, stares at Lance, and doesn't care that he's being obvious.

"It called to all of us," Lance says, frowning. He freezes, turns, looks at Shiro for a split second from past the bridge of his nose. "At least, I think it called out to all of us?"

Shiro takes a deep breath, tries not to let it out in a shaky mess. "Yeah. I heard it, too."

There was no way – _no way_ – the Galra could replicate the mental connection of the lions. It wasn't possible; the Alteans were quite proud of that.

The door clamors shut, and Shiro realizes that Keith's gone, disappeared into the cool darkness of the desert.

"Well, we may as well get this over with," Hunk says, sighing and pulling on his coat. "And to think I almost said today's been weird enough."

Lance follows, hasty but all smiles, and Shiro knows when he's projecting – when he's trying to keep the peace with his grin alone. The thought from before, the wound coil of terror, tightens when he realizes that all the tension between them was caused by him.

 _It wasn't like this before. Not the first time._

Shiro winces, and thinks different thoughts. It doesn't work.

"Are you coming?"

And that's when he realizes he's alone now, sitting in the dark with Pidge in the doorway, holding it open in invitation.

He stands before he understands why, lets his feet walk him towards Pidge's outstretched fingertips.

Somewhere, somehow, a part of his mind accepts that maybe this wasn't a Galra trap, and that maybe this wasn't Hell. Maybe it _was_ real, and maybe he was living a dream of could-have-beens. Despite it all, the admission is soothing, because at least it's an answer – something to latch on to and gnaw on like a teething child.

He relaxes, steps into the unknown, feels his shoulders slide back.

Maybe this wasn't the first time. Maybe this was a repeat of the past.

But, Shiro thinks, as he follows his team towards the hills, a second time's only a second time if there was always a first.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Thanks for reading!

Many thanks to the fantastic **MaethoMixup** for being my beta for this project!

The cover photo was drawn by - and used with permission from - the fantastic **v-0-3** on Tumblr! Links are on my profile page.


	2. Lance

Shiro's breath fogs the castle's glass window like a thin coating of grey paint. A sea of stars stares back at him, a billion miles between them, but Shiro still feels like he can feel the pinpricks of light pinching at the scars on his skin. His face is schooled into textbook indifference, locked up like the gold vault under Fort Knox despite there being nobody left to break in.

Space is quiet.

The castle walls around him are frayed and cracked, wide glass windows scuffed and scratched. Lights are out in the ceiling panels, and a select few flicker in annoyance when the engines cycle and hiccough from poor maintenance.

Ten years of war ate away at everything - not just the soldiers that fought it.

Space is quiet, but so is the castle. It's quiet without Keith plowing through training drones, quiet without Pidge whittling away at some circuit board in the bowels of the ship's engineering room, quiet without Hunk's bustling around in the kitchen.

There are four of them left, now: two incomplete paladins of Voltron and the last two survivors of a dying race.

Shiro, somehow, always knew it was going to end this way for him. There was something poignant and poetic about a black hole; something complete. A black hole for the black paladin.

He hears footsteps coming down the stairs behind him, hears the quiet whoosh of the observation deck's doors sliding open, and then Lance is there, all cuts and bruises and scar tissue ragged and carved into the mercury of his skin.

He doesn't bother saying anything. He saddles up to Shiro's side instead, hands shoved in the pockets of his tattered, outgrown jacket and trains his eyes out the window onto the painting of stars.

"You're thinking about it again," Lance says. He doesn't move.

Shiro turns from staring out into the void and assesses the damage of the last surviving member of his team. There's a pale scar running down the right side of his face, over the lid of his eye. The long, baggy legs of his pants cover up two synthetic limbs, Altean in design and real enough to get the job done, but even Shiro can't help but notice the way Lance limps and winces when he does more than meander.

"I'm might be leaving soon," Lance says, and it all falls into place.

Shiro blinks, lets his eyelids rest before opening them again, turning away. "You've been thinking about it, too, then."

He hates how raw his voice sounds.

"Shiro," Lance starts, sucking in a breath full of air and letting it out once he realizes the words aren't all quite there yet. He bites his lip, winces, shakes his head.

Shiro knows what Lance wants. It's something selfish, something close to the heart yet not close enough, something that Lance needs more than he needs Shiro, and it's _that_ confession that's taking its sweet time crawling its way out of Lance's mind into the open where Shiro could, helpfully, squash it with the heel of his boot.

"Go," Shiro says, dragging it out for him. "Don't worry about me."

Lance huffs. "No, Shiro. You know it's not that easy."

"It was easy enough for Keith."

Lance narrows his eyes. "You're not him."

Shiro purses his lips into a fine line, lets his vision unfocus and burrows a hole into the scuffed surface of the castle's glass exterior. Maybe it would crack and steal him away from having to make more bad decisions. "I know."

"You don't have to do this, you know," Lance says. It's the same as before, the same as all the other times before this one. "Come back to Earth with me."

Shiro tries to conjure up an argument, but he can't, because he knows there isn't one. Not really.

"You know I can't do that," he says, smile small and pained. He can, but can't. The perfect paradox.

"It's dangerous, you know," Lance says, running his tongue over his lips. "Thinking like that. Thinking that everything's fucked and the only way to fix it is to take yourself out trying to help somehow." He huffs. "Have you ever thought that maybe you'd be able to do more by staying alive?"

"Lance…"

But Lance is turning, fixing him with a glare and a frown that's more of a snarl than anything else. His lip quirks up the same moment his nostrils flare. "It's not running away. It's not being a coward. It's being _tactical_. I never thought I'd have to explain that to you of all people, Shiro."

Lance is tired. He's been through so much; Shiro can see it in the wrinkles in his face, the cracks and fissures and frown lines that'd replaced the smiles and the sarcasm and the joviality so many years ago.

"You can have your cake and eat it too," Lance says, and his voice cracks as well.

"Lance…"

His shoulders fall forward, spine slumping out of shape with the breath he lets out. He looks tired and aged and _broken_.

Shiro realizes he has a choice of dying stars to chase.

"For once, you can," Lance mutters, and he rests his forehead against the glass. "Please, Shiro."

He doesn't know why he lets Lance leave without him, but it's a choice he regrets the instant he sees the blue lion leave the castle's hangar and sputter through a fractured, crackling wormhole. But Shiro is Shiro, and he accepts his poor choices as meagerly as his decent ones.

Yes, space is quiet, but it's only ever as quiet as Shiro's mind.

* * *

Lance is staring at him. Shiro is staring at Lance.

The sun is rising on the horizon, and Shiro is eternally grateful Pidge stopped him before he could leave the shack in his prison clothes. The old flight suit he had found buried at the bottom of Keith's dresser fit him as well as it had the first time all those years ago, and the fabric clings to his sticky skin just the way he remembers it.

They round a corner, step across a fallen boulder, and Lance finally has enough.

"Why are you staring at me?" he demands, waving his hands around. "You haven't stopped since we left. Look, if there's something on my face, just tell me, because I've tried to check my reflection but there aren't exactly a lot of puddles out here in the desert, and Pidge whacks me when I try to use her glasses."

"That's true," Pidge says. "I do."

Shiro turns away, fixes his attention on the rocky path ahead of them. The truth was that he _was_ staring at Lance – at least at first. Then his mind takes a left where his body takes a right, and he's staring at a _different_ Lance. _His_ Lance.

He blinks, freezes, jolts a little when Hunk runs into him from behind. But the two Lances are still there, standing beside each other, one older and taller and thin around the waist.

Shiro turns back to the young one – the one from this world.

This Lance is young. This Lance is sarcastic. This Lance is excited and fun and untainted by the horrors of reality. He grins in wide arcs, not with small ticks at the corner of his lips; when he smiles, his eyes follow along, and don't look like they've been carved from the rest of his face, sunken and hollow and ready to rest.

When Shiro thinks about it, he's surprised his Lance didn't follow _him_.

After a few moments of silence, wherein Shiro is careful to keep his eyes trained forward and his face stoic and serious, Lance huffs and drops the subject. That's something else that separates him from the Lance Shiro knows – that Lance would have stayed quiet and simmered under the surface like a Pacific volcano.

Shiro watches Keith's back as he crests the small mountain pass, and realizes that his team, his _real_ team, simply exchanged one Keith for another.

"We're not afraid of you, you know."

Shiro startles, looking down underneath his metallic arm where Pidge had tapped him. She's still staring ahead, not looking up at him. Her face is set in a grim frown, eyes behind her glasses lidded towards her clicking, beeping machinery, but Shiro could tell she was watching him in that way only Pidge could manage, could tell because it was the same trick he'd tried to pull with Lance not a moment before.

"Why not?" he asks, truthfully, because it _had_ been something he'd considered.

"We're not afraid of you," Pidge repeats, "but we are worried about you. Whatever happened out there…"

She sighs, clicks her tongue. "We just want you to be okay, Shiro." I _just want you to be okay._

Shiro thins his lips into a line and says nothing. He looks up, and the other Lance is gone.

There was still a shred of doubt in his mind as to what he was doing. This could have all been an elaborate plot, too. Or maybe it was a memory, stubborn and fierce and lodged in Shiro's dying brain as he fell into the black hole.

The second option was more appealing. The second option meant he could _breathe._

"This is it," Keith says, stopping at the top of the next ridge, propping an arm up on his hip. The others follow suit, join him at the top, and look out over the valley they had stepped into.

The mountain ridge is the same as Shiro remembered it, a ragged cityscape of stone that dimples the horizon and frames the rising sun like a tightrope walker between two tall New York City apartment buildings.

"It's got to be around here somewhere," Hunk mutters, rubbing his chin with a hand and watching the clouds dip behind the stone pillars.

"I've already explored most of these caves," Keith says, pointing to a few dark holes in the rock down the valley from them. "Here. I'll take you towards the ones that are the most interesting."

Shiro frowns. _You were always so close, Keith._

The rest of the memory plays out for him like an old record, fuzzy in the middle when his mind starts to wander again, but sharp and crystal clear at all the points that matter. Keith shows them the cave, the mysterious structures and paintings that riddle the walls like unframed museum pieces.

Shiro watches Lance's eyes shimmer in the low light, watches him reach out and touch an etching of a large metal lion – _his_ lion. And then there's two Lances again, one real and one fake, both carving their stares into the stone.

Bright blue light seeps through the gaps in the roof and the floor and the walls, crawls across the cave in jagged paths, cuts cracks in the earth. Everything begins to shake.

"Hey, Blue," Shiro's Lance murmurs. His hand flattens against the rock, palm pressing into the notch in the lion drawing's head. He smiles, eyes sad and sunk deep into the pits of his skull, and it's only then that Shiro realizes this Lance is _far_ older. "Don't be afraid. I'll fix you up in no time."

A blast of dust scatters throughout the cave, and the phantom Lance disappears, replaced by the young one's flailing, frantic fingertips. He grabs at Shiro, misses, pulls at Pidge instead, and the floor collapses, sending them all tumbling down, down, down into the abyss of unseen desert caves.

 _"I'll fix you up. Don't worry. I'll fix you up."_

They fall into the water, one by one. Shiro pulls himself to his knees, reaches to prop Hunk up by his elbow, but something out of the corner of his eye stops him, reminds him to _look_.

The blue lion is there, shrouded in its particle barrier and crouched over itself in the low ceiling of the cavern. Everything is cast in a shimmery, clean, _ocean_ blue, like the sea had been distilled into light and dropped into the darkness by way of an old kerosene lamp.

The other Lance is already there, waiting.

He's dressed in long, flowing cloth, beige and heavy and slung over his shoulders like a poncho. It _is_ a poncho, Shiro realizes, watching him turn around and stare up at the lion: something old and frayed and well-weathered. The backs of his legs are exposed, and they're metal – metal bars, metal wires, metal plating that run down to a pair of stilted joints. Altean prosthetics.

So it _was_ his Lance.

The others around him are gaping, whispering under their breaths, staring up, too. But Shiro _knows_ they're not looking where he's looking, _knows_ they're not seeing what he sees.

The older Lance pushes at something on his face – glasses, thin and wiry and hung at the edge of his nose like an old librarian's – and looks over his shoulder.

He stares at Shiro. _Smiles_.

His hand moves toward the particle barrier.

Shiro's heart stops, seizes up like a spitfire engine, roars back to life when his breath catches and the adrenaline in his blood runs through him like rocket fuel. Had Lance made it back to Earth after all? Was he okay?

Was this a memory after all?

Shiro takes a step forward, falls back into the pool of water, stumbles away and passes the others, reaching out with his metal hand.

"Lance," he blurts, eyes wide, trips headfirst and falls onto a knee.

He looks up, and there's nothing there – nothing but the barrier, the hum of the cavern's wind, and four sets of confused eyes burrowing into the back of his neck.

He ignores Lance's muttered ' _I'm right here'_ , steps forward, and presses his fingers to the wall of light around Blue.

It shimmers, flashes white, disappears in a quiet hush.

A whisper ghosts through the cave, caught by the wind and riding on its back like a burst of ocean spray.

 _Welcome back_ , Shiro hears. _Welcome home._

* * *

Shiro remembers propping a pillow up on a wooden stool, dragging it out of the kitchen and into the living room of his parents' one-story suburban home. He settles down in front of the television with his arms pressed at his sides and watches the commercials roll. The light outside is faded, snow tapping in light flurries at the window panes.

There is a rush of silence, a flash of black, and the television comes alive with sound and light and theatrics.

Shiro buzzes on his chair.

A rocket, tall and imposing and larger than life sits on a pad. The footage crackles from age, zips in with a fast cut until all Shiro sees is the white-black paint of the Saturn V. Liquid oxygen gases out of the sides, billowing into vapor that rolls across the surface of the vessel like fog on a rocky cliffside. Piping and cabling and tubes full of propellant pinch at the metal fuselage, hissing and spitting like a feral cat.

The rocket begins to rumble.

"Ten," a nasally voice calls from the television's speakers. "Nine. Ignition sequence starts. Six."

White-hot fire bursts out of the bottom of the rocket, soaring away from the launchpad like water shot through a twenty meter wide firehose.

"Five," the announcer calls. "Four." The spindly arms snap away, pulling with them the loose cables and metal beams and condensing ice that falls from the edges and slips into the fireball at the base. "Three. Two."

Shiro leans forward.

"One. Zero. All engines running."

The rocket _leaps_. Camera footage skips from one vantage point to another, watching as the skyscraper of brutalist, flame-breathing fury defies the needy grasp of the Earth.

"Liftoff," Shiro hears, but he's not paying attention to the announcer anymore. He's stepped off the stool, walked to the television, all but pressed his face into the glass. "Liftoff on Apollo 11. Tower cleared."

* * *

There's a rumble in his soul when he steps back onto Blue.

She's there, all fine lines and sharp edges, all muted grey and flashy blue. She opens her mouth the instant Shiro steps up to her, and it's _wrong_ , because it never happened this way. This wasn't right.

None of this was right.

"Shiro?" Keith asks from behind him, and Shiro turns, expecting more. Instead, he just sees Keith, arms crossed over his chest but eyes searching, digging into the insides of the lion, looking for answers there rather than Shiro's face.

 _'Standby for Mode 1 Charlie. Mark, Mode 1 Charlie.'_

The cockpit is empty and clean and inviting. The lion bursts to life around them as they step inside, rumbling inside Shiro's chest, as if to say _it's you. It was always you._

Except it wasn't. Shiro grips the back of the lion's command chair, not daring to sit in it. Not this time, not the last. Not ever. Blue isn't his.

 _'This is Houston. You are GO for staging.'_

"It's a lion!" Lance says from behind him, all smiles and wide eyes. "It's a giant metal robot lion, and we're in it!"

"It's like Transformers," Hunk says, settling in beside him.

"I was thinking Power Rangers," Pidge adds helpfully.

Lance flies into the cockpit, squeezes around Hunk and steps past Shiro, standing next to the empty chair. He looks down at it, up at Shiro's hand, notes the creases he's searing into the material with his grip. He freezes.

Shiro lurches, pulls his hand back and blinks once, twice. "No," he says, looking at Lance. "It's all yours. Sit."

Lance doesn't move.

 _'Inboard cutoff.'_

Hunk turns, frowns at him. "Why him, though?" He narrows his eyes. "Do you know what this thing is?"

"No," Shiro lies easily. "But it called for Lance. I… could tell."

Maybe the lie wasn't quite so easy after all.

"You," Pidge says, looking at him from over the lip of her glasses. "You could tell."

Shiro raises an eyebrow. "Sure. Is that so hard to believe?"

"Honestly?" Pidge says. "Yeah. Yeah, it is."

 _'Inboard engines out.'_

"Guys," Keith says. "Shiro crashed here in an alien spaceship and has an alien arm."

"And alien trauma," Hunk leans over and mutters into Lance's ear. Pidge kicks him in the shin.

"I'm sorry," Shiro says, takes another step back. "I shouldn't've said anything."

 _'Inboard cutoff.'_

"I think," Lance starts, pauses, ogles at the dormant controls. "I think it wants _you_ to sit down, Shiro."

"And how would you know that?" Pidge snorts, turning to him.

"Again," Lance says, gesturing with his arms in a wide arc around them. " _Alien_."

Shiro steps forward, blinks, stares back and forth, back and forth from the blue lion's console to its empty seat.

 _"Standing by for the outboard engine cutdown now."_

 _Sit_ , it says.

Shiro pleads with it. If this is real, and this really is a second chance, then everything should go the way it had before. Including the good parts. _Especially_ the good parts. Lance deserves the blue lion, deserves everything that came after. It was a part of him, even now – even in a time when the two had only just barely met.

 _Sit,_ it says.

"What now?" Pidge asks.

Lance's face falls into a state of surprised seriousness. "I think it's… waiting."

Shiro grinds his teeth. He remembers a ship in orbit, remembers a threat so mundane that he'd hardly remembered it at all, a memory from before the veil of inexperience was pulled off his face.

"Only once," he mutters to himself. "Just this once." The others are close enough to hear, but say nothing.

 _Sit_ , it says.

Shiro sits.

 _'Staging and ignition.'_

* * *

At approximately eight minutes in to a Saturn V rocket launch, there is a moment where the ship splits in two. Staging, it's called. The empty half of the rocket, a giant hunk of spent metal, falls away. It drifts in the thin atmosphere, hanging in the blackening sky like a Christmas ornament.

Shiro likes this moment the best. It's the first time the rocket sees space.

The footage rolls. Shiro smiles, sinks to his feet and crosses his legs at the base of the television. The camera goes black, then grey, then flashes white and blue and suddenly all of Earth is there, staring back at him, peering through the porthole left by the departing first stage.

There's another engine there now, hidden in the darkness like a monster under a child's bed. But now it waits there, patient, until it knows it's needed.

A ring of flares fire around the black edge of the porthole. The door opens wider, and as the final piece of the departing stage falls away and the engine lights with a silent whoosh, all of space is invited in.

* * *

Shiro had only left Earth's atmosphere eight times. Six as a cadet, once as a pilot, and once when the blue lion swooped him and four other miscreant pilots up and dragged them out of the solar system by the scruffs of their necks. They had been children – all five of them, each in their own way.

Each time he found himself heading to space, he had a job to do - some sort of lifeline that kept him grounded and tethered and sane. The first time this happened - the _correct_ time - Lance had been at the helm, but even still, Shiro stood just behind, micromanaging, fixating on each one of them, burying his own insecurities under a layer of gravitas and encouragement. They didn't make him their leader; he did. They didn't need one - not yet. But he did.

Shiro finds the embrace of the captain's chair just as soothing as a therapists'.

The lion shudders under his controls, straining to go further, to move _faster_ , to do loops and swirls and dives through the air like a grounded bird taking flight for the first time. He smiles a little, but it's strained and confined to his lips. He's never flown a lion other than the black lion before, and he sees now exactly why Lance was the perfect match for Blue.

Shiro finds himself flying into space for the ninth time, away from a world that isn't his. It's the first time he bothers letting himself enjoy it.

The lion lunges for the sky, blasting straight up through the thinning atmosphere like a rocket. He hears the others behind him yelp in surprise, feels Pidge's boney fingertips clawing into the flesh on his shoulder to hold herself in place. The others aren't far behind, holding on to one another like a tangled-up bundle of barrel-of-monkeys.

For once, Shiro doesn't mind. He lets loose on the throttle and smiles.

 _'Apollo 11, this is Houston. You are confirmed GO.'_

* * *

"Is that a ship?"

Hunk is sitting in the corner, holding his stomach, making pitiful moaning noises. Lance is trying to lean against the sleek control panel to Shiro's right, arms propped up behind himself, fingers tapping empty, nonsensical words into whatever console had appeared when he first sat on it. He slides off, button on the reverse of his jeans catching on the edge of the metal, and jolts, forcing himself back up again.

Keith is looking over Shiro's shoulder, and Pidge is sitting cross-legged between Shiro's feet, tinkering with the crystal insides of the computer running everything.

But when she leans forward, frowns, and points to something in the distance, everyone crowds around the front display.

 _Oh_ , Shiro thinks. _Right. That._

It's a Galra frigate, hung in the space between the glowing, crystalline sphere of Kerberos – "We're already all the way out here?" Pidge had gawked – and it's just _waiting_ , exactly like Shiro remembers, sitting at the edge of the Solar System like a vampire begging for an invitation inside.

"That's not one of ours," Lance says, eyes wide. "That's _definitely_ not one of ours."

"Oh man," Hunk says, already looking green again. "I don't think I can take much more crazy flying."

"We're in zero-G," Keith says to him. "You'll be fine."

"That's not how zero-G works, dude," Hunk moans.

Keith turns looks back down at Shiro. "What do we do?"

Shiro narrows his eyes. "Take it out."

"What?" Lance asks. "Don't you want to open communications or something?"

"This isn't Star Trek, Lance," Pidge mutters. She stands, stares Shiro down. "Still, he's right. It's not exactly polite to attack a representative from an entirely new _alien civilization_ when they come knocking at your door." There's a panicked look in her eye, and Shiro remembers her brother and father.

"They're not on that ship," he says suddenly, voice low enough to where only Pidge can hear.

She freezes, eyes wide, and her mouth flaps open, closed, open. He realizes, a little late, that he might have been a bit too forward.

"W-what?" she whispers, but Keith speaks over her before she can put together enough words for a proper sentence.

"How do we even know this thing has weapons?" he asks.

Shiro reaches forward, grabs the control sticks, and the lion _roars_.

"That answers that question," Lance says.

"No, it doesn't!" Hunk says, frantic.

"Those are the Galra that kidnapped me," Shiro mutters. "They're going to attack Earth to get me back. They already made the first move."

He isn't going to tell them that it was personal beyond that as well, but he assumes they'll get the picture soon enough.

"Can this thing take something like that on in a fight?" Lance whimpers. "I mean, look at it. It's big, and purple, and evil looking."

"And purple," Hunk repeats, voice strained.

"Definitely purple." Lance confirms. "The scariest color." He waves his arms. "We're just in a giant metal space lion! What chance-"

Shiro flicks his wrist, and the lion lunges forward. Lance squawks.

A part of him, the part that hasn't been lobotomized from the stress and confusion and shoved away into a pit to be ignored until a later time, frowns. How is he managing to stay so calm through this? The ship he's attacking – the ship he's flying towards, slicing across with the blades of his lion's claws, battering with the laser stuck at the end of its tail, crumpling with the force of its forward weapons – is from the same army that had destroyed his team and left Allura dying.

His eyes pop open the instant the Galra ship falls to pieces behind them, diced into hundreds of chunks of sizzling, blackened metal.

Allura. He forgot about Allura.

The frigate's reactor detonates in a violent pink-purple mess. Blue's displays tint over gray, and the light from the explosion rushes past them like foamy ocean waves rocking against an old, decaying buoy.

Silence. The lion hums around him.

"Holy shit," Lance says, and Shiro remembers he's not alone.

He seizes, letting out a breath so sharply that it curls his chest inwards and forces his forehead to his knees.

"Holy _shit_ ," Lance repeats.

"Shiro?" Pidge asks, standing behind him now. He can't see her, but her voice is small. "What just happened?"

"They didn't even fire on us," Hunk says. "And we just… destroyed them."

"They kidnapped Shiro," Keith says. "I don't care."

"How do you know that, though?" Lance asks, raising his voice. "We don't even know where Shiro went in the first place! Or what happened!"

"I don't _care_ ," Keith bites back. "Shiro is back now. That's all that matters."

Shiro lets out a breath, rubs at his forehead with his human hand. He stares at the gridded floor panels in the blue lion, traces out constellations between the dots of sweat that drip down from his chin.

"Shiro," Pidge says, and her hand is on his shoulder, gripping into his skin. Her voice warbles. "What did you mean 'they're not on that ship'?"

The lion shudders, and Shiro sits up, eyes wide and pulse racing.

"The castle," he mutters to himself. Pidge frowns, takes her hand away, steps back until she bumps into the cramped glass wall of Blue's cockpit.

The castle. That's it. If the castle is real, and Allura is there, frozen like before… It isn't much, but it's a start. Shiro is still _very_ confused – a part of him thinks he might have left the majority of his brain in the swirling vortex of the black hole's event horizon.

But there's a spark, now. An inkling of hope – a countdown clock for a rocket launch that was already inevitable.

He doesn't know what's going on, but maybe? Maybe having answers to some of his more pressing questions would spur him along past the point where his own self-destructive coping mechanisms would tear him apart. _Again_.

And maybe the castle has those answers.

Blue leaps forward, and the others shout out in alarm. _I know_ , it says, as it speeds up, faster and faster, pressing out of the solar system and into interstellar space. _I know_ , it says, as it roars, and the swirling vortex of an Altean wormhole opens up in front of them.

 _I know,_ it says, as the lion falls through the portal, pulling them halfway across the universe and into a war that none of them ever wanted a part in.

Shiro feels a hand on his shoulder, tries to ignore the fact that it's Keith's, focuses on the pleasant hum of Blue underneath his fingertips.

 _I know._

 _'Hey Houston - Apollo 11. This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.'_

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Those Apollo 11 snippets are quotes from the actual mission transcript! You should read through the whole thing - it's honestly really fascinating. I'd post a link here, but you know how this site is with links. Sigh.

Regardless, thanks for reading!

Another huge thank you to **MaethoMixup** , my beta, for helping me clean up my frankly quite embarrassing tense errors (along with everything else)!

Come whisper sweet nothings into my ear on tumblr - username is EndoplasmicPanda!


	3. Allura

Allura's eyes are closed, but she isn't sleeping.

The castle's royal bedchambers are a mausoleum, cocooned in metal and glass and shield. The further Shiro descends down the long, winding corridors of the ship, the more claustrophobic he feels.

He runs a hand out beside him as he walks, letting his fingers catch along the subtle cracks that would be more at home on a garden wall than a spacecraft. They twist and bend over one another, spiral together and pull away, orchestrating a bizarre dance that dissolves into chaos the further Shiro goes. By the time he reaches the end of the line, his chest has an unpleasant ache to it – like Shiro's stumbled into an unmarked Egyptian tomb and the ceiling is going to slowly start to sink in on him, or turn to spikes, or explode.

Still, when he steps through the sliding doors of Allura's room and they click shut behind him, he trades the pressure and tension for a different kind of unease.

Allura is framed by her bedsheets, taut fabric tucked around her frail body like the flag over the lid of a military man's coffin. Her face is cold and sterile, mouth left open enough for her quiet breaths to slip out.

She's old now. She was ten thousand years old before, but now she looks every day.

"Shiro."

Shiro blinks. "Coran," he replies, voice low and careful. "How is she?"

A beat of silence follows Shiro into the room, settles amongst the bright white walls of the castle. A light flickers overhead.

"Well, it's certainly not looking good," Coran finally says, and somehow, his voice comes across as positive and comforting, like always.

Shiro can tell it's an act he's putting on for himself just as much as for anyone else. He frowns, moves toward the bed, lets himself drift into the seat propped up alongside Allura's nightstand.

Coran steps out of the private bathroom, sets a moist cloth inside a bowl on the near table, watches as Shiro reaches forward to trace the wrinkles and lines down her face until he loses count and has to start over again.

"Is it reversible?" Lance had asked six months earlier. Coran's silence had been as telling as the rot running through the inside of the ship.

The castle had been falling apart; there was no other way to put it. The home of Voltron had been just as much physical as it was mental, and with barely half a team still around and three people's worth of functioning, non-mechanical limbs between them, things were looking just as bad as they felt.

Long, spindly cracks had begun running down the walls like fissures at the bottom of a deep sea trench, deep and wide and large enough for Shiro to shove his hand inside and reach the next room over. Half the doors had been broken, and the rest that weren't had to be strong-armed open the rest of the way.

It had been disheartening. Their home was crumbling with their spirits.

But Allura had been there for them. She would smile, press her eyes closed, tell them to get some rest and prepare for the trials in the days to come – because there were always trials, was always a moving target in war.

And just like that, their attention would be redirected elsewhere. The world would keep spinning, keep puttering along like the engine on an old Willis Jeep.

And, bit by bit, the castle had begun to repair itself.

Gashes would appear and disappear over the course of a day, healing over like trampled hedges in a garden maze. Shiro would mark them with a red pen, trace around the hole in the wall, marvel at the fact that the only thing he'd find the next morning would be the ink and nothing else. Lance was growing confident that his search for Pidge and Hunk was going well, that Blue would find them soon, and Shiro, for the first time since the first month of the war, let his hopes soar higher than they deserved to.

It wasn't until Allura had collapsed at the command console, breathing heavy and speech slurred, that Shiro and Lance realized what was happening. It wasn't until she slipped into restless sleep that Shiro and Lance were afraid.

"Altean technology is, by design, attached to the user in a way that simply isn't possible to describe in just words," Coran had said. "It's what gave us our edge over the Galra in the first war, and is what has allowed our species to last as long as it has, through us."

It took her near death for the two of them to realize Allura had been killing herself so they could keep fighting.

Coran's hand dabs the rag against Allura's forehead, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow and tucking a loose strand of silver hair back behind her ear. Her body is decaying, energy spent trying to repair the heart of the ship, and every crack, every fissure on the walls had dug themselves into her skin instead.

Shiro snaps back to reality.

Coran is already talking. "So I take it Lance has left?"

"Just this morning, yeah," Shiro murmurs. He lets his head dip down.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there to see it," Coran says.

Shiro wants to tell him that Lance left when he did to avoid looking them both in the eye, wants to tell him that Lance had to tear himself away from his rooted place in Blue's hangar with tears streaming down his face because his heart was split just as much as his body was.

Instead, he smiles, fake, and says, "Well, you know Lance. He didn't want to be late for dinner with his mother."

Coran, thankfully, smiles back, eyes pulling shut. Shiro can't tell if it's real or not, and supposes he's glad he doesn't know. "Perhaps I shall one day visit your planet. It sounds like a delight."

Shiro opens his mouth, turns to cock his head to the side and make a small joke despite the circumstances, and he would have, had the universe not had it out for him.

Something grabs at his arm.

Coran's face goes pale. Shiro freezes.

"Princess?" Coran whispers. Shiro turns.

Allura is awake, eyes glassy and thin in her wrinkled face. Her eyebrows are pressed into the line of her hair, and she's shaking, breath wheezing from her nose and blitzing over the skin on Shiro's arm like ice.

"Allura," Shiro breathes.

She stares at him, stares until the corners of Shiro's vision start to whisper away to black. Coran's voice turns from surprised to frantic, but it fades away, too – all Shiro can see are the bright white spotlights of Allura's eyes, tugging him in like guideposts.

He blinks, and a world goes by.

Coran is tugging him away, holding him upright as the ringing in his ears passes. Shiro huffs a shaky breath, lets the room stop spinning, burns a hole into where Allura has sunken back into her bedsheets, silent and still as stone.

"Shiro?" Coran begs, pulling open his drooping eyelids with a thumb. "Shiro, what happened?"

* * *

"You aren't who you think you are."

* * *

The planet Arus is just as Shiro remembers it – green grass and blue skies and oceans that stretch past the horizon and carry with them a weight of obligation that he feels, chest crushing, before the blue lion even so much as touches down on the dirty courtyard outside the front gates.

"This is another planet," Pidge breathes. "This is another planet. We're on another planet right now."

"That's a castle," Hunk says. He points, in case someone hadn't caught on yet. "A big, giant, space castle in space."

"On another planet," Pidge repeats.

Lance opens his mouth, shuts it, shakes his head and gives up, lost for words.

Keith's lips thin into a fine line. He says nothing.

The four of them file out of Blue like the rag-tag group of young adults they are, bumble about in front of the entrance while Shiro takes his time - step by step, measure by measure.

By the time he's made it down Blue's throat and joined them, their excitement has worn off.

All of them – except Pidge, who's started poking around at a control panel on the wall – are staring at him.

"What?" Shiro blinks.

Lance raises an eyebrow at him, crosses his arms over his scrawny chest and leans forward a bit. "Are you alright, man?"

"Yeah," Hunk says. "It's a bit weird how laissez-faire you're being about all of this."

"Guys," Keith says. "Not now."

Lance balks. "Why not? Why not now? He's obviously still freaking out from everything that happened earlier, and he needs to, like… I dunno, talk about it or something."

"How is he freaking out by being calm?" Pidge asks.

"I dunno?" Lance says, waving his arm in the air. "He's just… I don't know! Acting weird!"

"You barely know the guy," Hunk says, raising an eyebrow, but he freezes when Keith bares down on them all with a look.

"Not now," he bites.

Pidge yelps, and something on the control panel she'd been tinkering with flashes green. The castle door lights up, clicks to life like the spooling of an old film projector.

It slides open with a rush of stale air and dust, and Shiro swallows his tongue.

"Did I do that?" Pidge says, stepping back and staring up the wall.

"Should we even go inside?" Keith asks. Shiro ignores the fact that he looks to Shiro first.

"I mean, that lion led us here, right?" Lance says. He points behind them at Blue, whose eyes are stone cold and frozen in place, but still seem to be following Shiro as he moves.

Go, it says. Go, agrees Shiro's subconscious.

He starts walking, steps past the others, lets himself fall into the shadows of the dormant Altean castle.

The walls are humming as he moves, pleased. They're unblemished and whole - like a newborn child. The lights in the walls flicker on with a flash of pale blue, and the castle wakes up from its hibernation a little more with each of Shiro's hesitant footsteps.

Being here was a choice. It was an expectation. Shiro had been given another chance - had been allowed to take a different path. Memories of an old Robert Frost poem flicker through Shiro's mind, and his stomach clenches.

What if he was making the wrong choice? What if all the suffering and the turmoil and heartache he had suffered as the black paladin was avoidable? What if the universe was supposed to sort itself out on its own – and that with the addition of Voltron's uprising, the delicate equation keeping the galaxy in order was thrown out of balance?

He takes a shaky breath, clenches his fingers into a fist at his side, ignores how familiar the feeling of metal crumpling metal in his synthetic palm is.

Every step into the castle seals his fate. Shiro chews on his bottom lip.

Go, Blue purrs in his mind. Be the hero.

Shiro doesn't want to be a hero. He wants to be a normal person.

But as the doors slide shut and seal them inside, and as Keith saddles up beside him and walks just a hair closer than the rest, Shiro realizes he can be both.

This time, he can be both.

* * *

The first thing Shiro does is lead them to the cryopod room.

"This place is incredible," Pidge gasps, running her hand along the walls as she walks, letting her fingers catch in the small perforations that wind across the castle like patchwork circuitry. "I wonder how old it is."

"At least, like, a hundred years," Hunk mutters. They pass a door - Shiro ignores it, tunnel vision locked on the path ahead, but Hunk peeks inside, pivots on one foot until he's able to glance around. "Whoa!" he says. "I think this is some kind of armory!"

"We need to keep moving," Keith says. His voice is quiet and directed at the others, as though he's worried about Shiro overhearing despite the fact that he's barely a few steps behind.

"Why, though?" Pidge asks, raising an eyebrow, stopping with Hunk, curious by the contents of the new-found room. "We have all the time in the world. This place was abandoned for, like, centuries; what's a few more minutes?"

Keith pauses mid-step, swayed by the (more than rational) thought. He looks at Shiro, looks back at Pidge, blinks a few times.

Shiro keeps walking.

Lance sighs and grabs Hunk by the collar of his vest. "We need to stick together," he says, tugging. "And Shiro's obviously not stopping."

"It's like he's been here before," Hunk mutters.

Pidge purses her lips. She falls in line with the others, keeping up with Shiro's grueling, increasingly frantic pace.

"We're almost there," Shiro mutters, for himself more than anyone else. A part of him fears what things might have changed about this world - this version of things. Maybe the castle would be empty, and they would be forced to fend for themselves.

Shiro's stomach knot tightens. Maybe Allura was already dead.

Keith steps past Shiro, walks just in front of him, leans in and frowns. "Almost where?" he asks, quiet. He looks past Shiro's shoulders to where the others are staring at them - Lance with his hands behind his head and Hunk with his hands in his pockets and Pidge with her hands folded tight behind her back.

Shiro stops walking in front of a pair of massive blue-white doors, waits for the others to stop as well. "Here," he says, turning towards the panel on the door.

His heart jumps in his chest with each beat like the roar of an unmounted engine. His eyes lock ahead, unfocused, even as his bionic hand seeks out the panel and presses into the sensor, waiting for it to flash a satisfied green.

The doors slam open with a loud clunk of mechanical whirring and dormant energy.

The pod room sits in front of them, dark and quiet and just a tad too cold.

Shiro steps inside.

"What is this place?" Lance asks. He huffs a breath from behind Shiro. "Man, I'm glad I brought my jacket."

"This looks like some sort of medical bay," Pidge says. She marches past them, finds the console at the center of the room and pokes around at it.

Shiro doesn't realize he's stopped walking until a recessed pod sits beneath him, hidden in the floor, locked away for ten thousand years.

"How did you get any of this to work, Shiro?" Pidge moans. "Nothing I do is responding. None of the displays are turning on."

Shiro stares at the ground beneath his feet. Please, he thinks. I just want to see her alive again.

The pods hiss.

Shiro's eyes widen.

The lights in the room come on with a small sound, and somewhere deep within the bowels of the castle, something loud and powerful rumbles to attention. The ground thunders beneath them, vibrates for a moment, and the walls shudder with energy an energy that charges the air and sets Shiro's hair on end.

All around them, the consoles and the screens and the small medical devices scattering the walls and tables come to life, chirping and chiming and twinkling with blue starlight.

"Whoa," Pidge says, gasping. "Shiro, what did you do?"

But Shiro isn't listening. He's watching the pods, watching them fill with steam, watching them rise out of the ground with a hushed whisper and click into place above the floor. An alarm clangs on the command console.

"I can't read any of this," Pidge murmurs. "It's all a bunch of squibbles."

"Shiro," Keith says, stepping in front of him, hand wrapped around the handle of his ruined blade. "Stand back."

"No," Shiro says. He reaches forward, grabs Keith's shoulder, guides him to his side. He points at the medical pod, eyes wide. "Watch."

The pod doors open. Steam billows out from the bottom like fog rolling over a calm ocean, and the room clouds over with moisture.

A shadow within the pod's confines shifts. Shiro moves before he can stop himself, reaching past the darkness and grabbing at the body that sat inside, pulling it out with a ginger touch.

"Father?"

Allura falls into Shiro's chest with a surprised huff, arms tucked around her chest and forehead dipped down. She groans, mutters something under her breath, collapses like a noodle in his arms.

The room is silent.

"What?" Hunk asks. "What just happened?"

"Did she just call you her dad?" Pidge asks.

"Who's that?" Lance says. He sniffs. "Who is that?"

"Allura," Shiro breathes, eyes wide.

Pidge socks Lance across the shoulder, but Shiro tunes them out. All he sees is Allura, turning and looking up at him and frowning - actually frowning - when she doesn't recognize his face, twisting in his grasp, and dipping out from beside him.

She's alive. She's breathing, and conscious, and moving. There are no wrinkles - no scars. Everything is fresh and new and unblemished. They're all together again, at the beginning.

He doesn't realize he's been lost in his own mind until Allura has him on his stomach, pinned down with his arm shoved against his back.

"Who are you?" she asks, but it's not a question. It's a demand - the order of a princess whose civilization just evaporated into dust over the instant of ten thousand years.

Then Keith is moving, face turned down in a snarl, pulling his knife out from its holster, jumping the distance between them like a jackrabbit-

"Keith!" Shiro barks, turning his head. "Stop!"

The room freezes over in silence.

"Who," Allura asks again, voice low and cold and out of patience, "are you."

"Maybe if you let him stand up," Pidge says, stepping forward, "he'll be able to explain himself." Her arms are crossed around her chest, and she's frowning.

Shiro realizes that he owes the rest of them just as much of an explanation as he does Allura.

A second pod unseals across the room, and Lance, Pidge, and Hunk move to comfort Coran as he defrosts and panics in his own special Coran way. But Shiro is still being held down by Allura's piercing stare, arm gripped tight under Keith's protective, white-knuckled fingertips, still caught off guard by the possibility that he would find answers to the problems in his life.

A part of Shiro – the part that traces the imperfections in her blue-violet eyes – realizes that he would never have them all.

* * *

"You arrived in the blue lion?" Allura asks, sucking water through a straw, seated on the edge of one of the consoles in the bridge. Her shoulders are hunched forward, and her face is set like stone, grim and stoic.

"The blue lion?" Keith asks. "You act like there are more."

Allura's smile is more of a grimace than a grin. "There are."

"There are other lions?" Lance says, eyes wide, face lighting up. "That means there might be enough for all of us!"

"What makes you think we're even keeping the blue one we rode here on?" Pidge asks, looking at him over the rim of her glasses, arms crossed over her chest.

"Because if we don't, we're stuck here?" Hunk says.

Allura's mouth thins to a fine line, and her eyes drift everywhere but someone else's face.

Shiro sighs, sitting down next to her. "Allura," he says, not entirely sure what to say but knowing he has to say it.

"How do you even know my name?"

Shiro freezes, turns to look at her when he realizes exactly what it was she'd just asked. "What?" he says anyways, hoping to buy himself some time.

"You said my name," she says, still staring down at the ground. "I have no idea who you are, or what's happening, and yet you still knew my name."

Shiro said nothing.

"What happened, exactly?" Allura asks, looking up. "What's going on?"

"That's something I should hopefully know the answer to rather soon," Coran quips, tapping away at a console nearby. He frowns. "Although I'm not entirely sure why, but the castle's computers aren't listening to me."

"They're what?" Allura asks, leaning onto her feet and walking across the room to stare at his screen. "What do you mean they aren't listening to you?"

Coran taps at a button written in Altean that appears on his display, and when it flashes red, he shrugs. "See? Nothing's working. It's like the castle's still locked down and waiting for a commanding officer to bring it online."

"But I'm awake," Allura murmurs, frowning, stepping toward the middle of the bridge. "That can't be right."

She pivots on the raised platform at the center of the room, clears her throat, and raises her hands to waist height.

Nothing happens.

Allura blinks. "What?"

Coran twiddles with his mustache. "Well that's bizarre indeed." He turns back around and begins pounding away at the screen in front of him. "Blast! The usual workaround is locked out, too. Nothing's working."

"What's wrong?" Pidge asks, walking up. She leans on the console, looking at the sea of Altean text that's rolling across Coran's screen in angry red flashes.

"The castle was supposed to respond to my presence the moment I woke," Allura says, voice low and thoughtful. She raises an eyebrow, staring at one of the metal beams splitting the glass above them. The view is blocked by a metal shield, and the only source of light in the room is cast by the rings around the doors and the glow from Allura's face markings.

She frowns. "I am of royal Altean blood. The castle is my birthright. I needn't be added into the system, because I was always there."

'You aren't who you think you are.'

Shiro's eyes widen.

"What if you weren't?" Shiro asks.

Allura turns; fixes him with a hard stare. "What do you mean by that, human?"

"What if you weren't in the system," he says.

"Then who is?" Coran asks, snorting. "Harlefax Quantimary?"

The others in the room stare at him, blank-faced.

"Sorry," Coran says. "I'm dating myself with that reference, aren't I?"

"There are only two ways for someone to have access to this castle. One of them is by blood, and the other is by blessing." Allura frowns again, arms crossed and tight above her waist. "I just don't understand."

"But the castle did light up when we got here," Lance says, scratching a spot under his ear. "The doors opened and the lights came on and everything."

"That wasn't her?" Hunk asks, pointing at Allura.

"Well then," Coran says, as if struck with inspiration. He taps a few different buttons on the display, frowns when the computer takes its time.

"More so than that," Allura asks, looking down at Shiro from her post, "I want to know who you are and why you're here."

"We already told you," Keith says. "We're humans. From Earth. That giant, weird robot lion brought us all here."

"I understood that part," Allura says. She's still staring at Shiro. "But why you five?"

Shiro understands the other question she's asking – the one she's carving into Shiro's skin with her eyes like a brand.

'Why are you here?'

Shiro swallows and breaks eye contact.

"Aha!"

Everyone in the room jumps.

Coran leans over his display, flaps his arm behind him, beckoning them over. "Princess, I just scanned the ship for any possible master keyholders." He pauses, pointing at the display, looking behind him with a smile. "There's one. One of us in this room."

Allura huffs and rolls her eyes, stepping off the pad. "I suppose it makes sense that even after however long it's been, my father doesn't trust me with the power to run the castle by myself." She looks at Coran, beckons him over with a thin hand.

"Ah, yes," Coran says, sheepishly. "I suppose I can understand King Alfor's reasoning. Even if it's not ideal in this situation." He stops at the center command console, winks at Allura. "I know for certain you'd make a better captain than I will."

He raises his hands, stands up straight, and closes his eyes.

The castle stays silent.

Coran deflates like a wet napkin, falling forward at the waist. "Whew," he says. "Thank quiznak for that."

Allura steps up again, eyes wide and frown carved small across her face. She pushes him back into position. "No. You weren't trying hard enough. Do it again."

He does. Again, nothing happens.

Lance coughs. "Uhh…"

"Princess," Coran sighs. "It's not working."

Shiro blinks, and Allura's in his face, eyebrows cutting deep across her forehead. "What's going on?"

He stutters, opens his mouth, licks his lips when nothing substantial (or understandable) comes out. "Allura…"

"Stop saying my name," Allura spits, spinning around, her dress billowing out behind her. "Something is happening here. I don't know what, but it's mutinous at best." She points at the rest of them. "Piracy at worst."

"We're—what?" Keith says, leaning back. "We're not pirates."

"Sounds like something a cornered pirate would say," Coran pipes up.

Allura is moving across the room again, stepping towards the others, ready to stare them each down. "None of us are leaving this room until I have an explanation."

Shiro moves. He does it on instinct, much like how every part of him operates, and he finds himself halfway across the room, reaching for her arm with his mechanical hand to stop her before she could do or say something she couldn't take back.

The castle chirps in satisfaction, and the entire room erupts with light and noise and vibration.

Coran is spinning in front of his console, slamming his fingertips against every available surface, reading the foray of green text cascading in front of him. Display panels appear in thin air all around the room, flashing and blinking and whispering information into Shiro's ear in a way he couldn't quite explain. The massive blast shields covering the glass ceiling from view of the starry Arusian sky rumble and click, and one by one, the layers peel away like an onion, until the universe is in the room with them, settled snugly across each of their shoulders.

Shiro looks down.

He's standing with his hand outstretched, and instead of Allura's sleeve, he's caught the metal control pillars that the castle had pushed between them.

Allura's eyes are wide – confusion feeding to surprise feeding to fear feeding to anger.

"You stole it," she murmurs, as Coran begins to chirp with glee. "You stole this castle from me."

"I didn't," Shiro says. "I didn't do anything."

"Then why," Allura asks, "does the Castle of Lions believe you to be her keeper?"

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Hahahahahahaaaaaaa I'm terrible at writing romantic buildup

Thanks again to my beta, **MaethoMixup**!

Thank _you_ for reading!

Scream into the void with me over on my **Tumblr**! - username is EndoplasmicPanda!


	4. Pidge & Hunk

They're fighting, they're losing, and Shiro is trying - desperately - to keep them together.

"Keith, to your left!" Lance yells into the comms, and the red blur in Shiro's peripheral vision dips away, chased by a squadron of enemy fighters.

"I'm running out of room here," Hunk says from somewhere behind. "Pidge, where's that—"

"On it," Pidge's voice crackles, and there's a blast of green light in Shiro's eyes and a Galra cruiser exploding into thin dust.

The planet beneath them is shattered, a ruined shell of what used to be a beautiful blue marble suspended in space. Now all that's left are crumbs, and the Galra army's quintessence factories are drifting in orbit around the cracked, cooling crust, protected by a fleet so huge Shiro can't see where space begins.

A stray laser beam grazes the black lion's belly, and he jerks the joysticks to the side, sending it into a tailspin.

"We need a plan," Shiro says, swallowing. "We can't just fight through them all like this."

He flies forward, dips past a stray asteroid that used to be a chunk of the planet's moon, flies into a foray of missile fire and soundless explosions.

Something bursts into his field of view from underneath him.

"Shit," he bites out, seizing on the controls, and the forward thrusters in the lion's shoulders catch him just in time.

The Galra cruiser twists to the side, firing bolts of bright red from its cannons. Shiro winces, hits the accelerator, twists the black lion into a cartwheel and dances across the metallic surface of the ship's hull.

He drags Black's claws out as he flies, and when he looks back into her rear camera, the ship is venting atmosphere and leaking engine fuel and—

"I've got you!" Pidge barks over the radio, and the ship splits in two, oxygen and loose oil crackling into blue-black fire with a rush of heat and energy.

"I've got another pair of frigates bearing down on me," Keith bites, voice low and muffled.

"I'm halfway across the system dealing with a druid," Hunk shouts. "Could use a bit of backup here—"

Another explosion in the center of the planet's orbit scrambles the comms system into a rush of incomprehensible static, and Hunk's words are sacrificed for the death of another Galra vessel.

"Backup has arrived!" Coran's voice chirps in Shiro's ear, and his gut twists. Before him, the blue-white beacon of the Castle of Lions appears from behind a cloud of gas.

"Coran," he says, channeling his most stately, professional voice and doing his best to hide the quiver in his lungs. "We need to leave. You should do the same."

"Unfortunately," Allura says, "it's a little too late for that. Our hiding place the next star over was compromised. It seems the Galra really do not want us to take out their quintessence harvesters."

"Which is what we're about to do," Lance says, and Shiro can tell he's grinning just from the flutter of his voice. "Hang tight, everyone!"

"Wait – Lance!" Coran calls, but Shiro can already see the blue lion flash across his screen, disappear to his left, corner a slow and sluggish Galra transport vessel—

The black of space flashes white. Shiro hisses, slams a forearm over his eyes, slaps his hands at the control sticks and misses. There's a touch of silence, a simmer of heat, and then the stars are on fire, caught like a tidal wave, blowing out from the planet's surface like a tsunami.

The black lion is cast aside. It crashes into the bridge of a nearby Galra ship, tears _through_ it, blasts apart a chunk of rock the side of a neighborhood. Shiro's arms dive for the lion's controls again, but it's useless – across the battlefield from him, the Galra fighters and cruisers and frigates and battleships are all uprooted in a silent hush, tumbling tumbling tumbling…

"Lance!" Pidge's voice cuts through the static. "What the f—"

More hissing over the radios. Shiro thinks he can hear Coran's voice. "—primed a quintessence—" he says, whispering in and out of focus. "The planet's…"

"Coran, repeat," Shiro says. His voice is low – scared.

"-Out of there! Get out of there _now!_ "

His eyes flicker open. Outside the windows of his lion, Shiro can see the glow of the planet's surface, and it's getting bluer and bluer and bluer and—

White. An orb of white light suffocates the fractured rock, grows into a small sun, expands into a balloon the size of a gas giant, and it's still getting bigger.

The lion shudders around him. Shiro starts to feel the tug of gravity, even from half an orbit away.

" _Shit,_ " he says again, bites his lip until it bleeds. Black is already struggling to maintain position, and when Shiro slams down the controls to power ahead, full steam, he's still barely moving.

Galra ships and space debris and chunks of asteroid and the stars themselves fall away, disappear behind him. The quiet darkness of space fades to grey, then eggshell white, then searing, bright nothing, edging across the surface of his eyes like the fade of unconsciousness.

He's moving backward. The engines are straining. He can hear the rumble and groan of metal being twisted and pulled in all the wrong ways.

Shiro bites his lip. The blood seeps out of the cut, drips across his face and splatters against the wall behind him.

Something was going to give. His energy fades, his eyes aching to stay open.

Shiro sees a flash of red, and Keith's lion appears from behind a crumbling asteroid. It's inching towards him, straining against the pull, but its losing.

The last ounce of air in Shiro's lungs is yanked out of him, too.

"—wormhole!" Coran's voice cuts through the comms. His voice is high pitched and fast, like being played through a tape recorder at twice speed. "Jump into—"

He doesn't wait for the end of Coran's sentence. Shiro nudges the black lion, forces it just a bit more forward, just a bit farther…

The wormhole engine spools up in his lion's belly. The thrusters struggle to keep him moving, but he can tell the force of the entity behind him has started to win.

Something clicks. A gate opens.

Shiro blasts through, comes out the other end at eighty percent light speed, and doesn't realize until two hours later and after the others have reconvened that Pidge and Hunk never made it back.

* * *

"That was unexpected," Hunk says.

"And yet?" Pidge says, stepping behind him. "Not really."

Shiro looks down, first from where his hands sit comfortably across the castle's control interface, then to where Allura's cutting through him with what may as well have been laser vision.

"How," she bites, "did you do that?"

Shiro's mouth opens, closes; his eyes flutter and flit back and forth from his hands, _his own hands_ gripping the castle's controls. Not Allura's. His.

He takes a step back, vacates the room's center, sighs with raw, instinctual relief when the glowing lights around him sputter and die, vanishing into the air like mist. No longer the center of attention. No longer in danger.

Allura bumps past him, reaches for the interface. Her hands press into the crystal, and for a moment, Shiro's gut twists in all the right ways, at all the right times. The sight is familiar – like home or green grass or springtime after a hard winter. For a moment, it soothes, like an ice pack on a burn or water after chewing gum or a warm blanket and warmer friends.

But, like all moments, it passes. Allura's hands do nothing.

The castle goes dormant again. Winter comes back.

Allura's eyes are in his face. She grew a few inches in the three steps it took for her to move from the pedestal, and now she stands, nose to nose, looking down at him like a sniper glaring down the barrel of their gun.

"Wasn't she short a minute ago?" Lance whispers.

"What part of 'aliens' don't you understand," Pidge mutters back.

"You come into _my_ castle," Allura says, "piloting _my_ lion, and then have the… the _audacity_ to take ownership of this place as if it was yours all along."

There are tears streaming down her face. Shiro swallows, surprised, and Allura seems to take offense to the bob of his Adam's apple.

Her snarl turns manic. "What's to say you didn't kill my father to get here?"

"Princess," Coran warns.

"What?" she says, reeling on her advisor. Her face falls, and she lets out a choppy breath. "It's not an unlikely thought. Please tell me you weren't thinking the same thing."

"They're children," Coran says. His voice is calm, and his smile is sincere. "They're children. Just like you."

"Children can do despicable things," Allura says. Her eyes flit back to Shiro's. "I can see it in his eyes. There's something there. Something _wrong_."

"There's something in all of us," Coran says. "It's not just them."

Allura folds. She falls forward, catches the edge of Coran's console, grips the metal and glass with her hands until they're clammy and white.

"I want answers," she says. "I need them."

"You won't find them with anger," Coran says. "You know that."

Shiro is still frozen, feet locked in place near the center of the room. When Allura turns away, he takes a step back, then another, then makes a beeline for the others once he's certain the princess won't come for his neck again.

He winds up next to Keith. They share a look, and when Keith glances over his shoulder at the simmering princess, he seems confused. Worried.

Shiro knows Allura, and knows what she's capable of. That much, at the very least, hasn't changed. But Keith wouldn't know that.

"What just happened?" Hunk asks, and that's when Shiro realizes they're all staring at him, just as confused.

"I don't know," Shiro says, because it's all he can say. "I don't know."

"We need to figure out what's going on here," Keith says. He takes a small step forward.

"We need to help them," Shiro says, words slipping through his teeth far too easily. He's used to this sort of conversation, used to sharing the same goals with the same people.

But when the rest of his team freeze in surprise, he realizes, again, that he's not at home anymore. These paladins – if they could even be called that in this lifetime – weren't his paladins. They didn't understand why Allura was important.

"Uhh, _why_?" Lance asks, looking at him like he'd grown back his missing limb right before their eyes. "That girl is crazy!"

"I thought you liked crazy?" Hunk asks.

"Not now!" Lance says.

"I don't know," Shiro says. Again.

"The same reason you didn't know why you had to sit down in the lion ship?" Pidge asks, crossing her arms, narrowing her eyes at him. "Or the same reason you didn't know why we ended up here, or the same reason you woke them up in the first place?"

"Pidge," Keith says.

"Don't 'Pidge' me, buster!" she says, turning on him, forcing a finger into his gut. "You're acting awfully laissez-faire about all of this, considering what you have at stake!"

Keith's eyes steal a look at Shiro, but he doesn't say anything.

"I just want to know what's going on," Pidge says, sighing, settling down on the cold metal floor. She hugs her knees. "That's not exactly a tall order."

Despite everything he _does_ know, Shiro can't help but agree.

* * *

Allura calms down. Shiro knew she would.

They walk together toward the mess hall, the five of them in a tight group. Allura and Coran lead the way; Shiro tries his best to pretend not to know the route by heart.

"This is the Castle of Lions," Coran says. He spins, walks backwards, grins at them as he talks. "Princess Allura's father, King Alfor, commanded this vessel during the great Galra War ten thousand years ago. It's laid dormant ever since."

"Galra?" Hunk asks.

"Oh, yes!" Coran says. "I'm surprised you didn't encounter them on the way here. Nasty things, they are."

"We did."

The group freezes. Keith looks straight ahead, eyes burrowing into a point in the wall across the castle.

"Run into them," he clarifies, once Coran's confused stare goes on for long enough. He turns, looks at Shiro. "At least, I'm assuming that's who was piloting the ship we destroyed."

"Galra," Shiro confirms. The word feels foreign and fake on his tongue. "They were Galra."

Allura lets out a choked noise, swivels from the front of the pack and stares. "What?" she says. Her eyes tell the others a story Shiro's lived countless times - a story he's died by.

It's all the prompting Coran needs to usher the others along, tugging them through an open door and into the castle's kitchen.

Then it's just Shiro and Allura.

"Show me," she says.

* * *

They're back in the bridge, steel doors sliding open in understanding silence. The air is still stale and dark when they walk inside, and it's not until Shiro steps forward again, hands outstretched and expecting, that the lights come on and the life support whirs online from hidden behind some wall.

Shiro watches Allura step up to the podium beside him and hesitates.

"I'm not sure I should do this," he says, truthfully. He bites his lip. "I don't deserve it."

"We don't have a choice," she says, voice quiet.

Shiro understands, ignores the feeling of pity sliding in his gut like a snake. He stomps on it, lets it fester and die under his boot. Allura is strong – she is and always would be strong. The castle doesn't make the princess – the princess makes the castle.

And now, it seems, Shiro has to become a prince.

The floor reaches out and bridges the gap, shoving the controls underneath his fingers before he can question himself and iterate through another cycle of internal frustration.

"Please," Allura says, and Shiro remembers why he's doing this.

It doesn't take much mental effort to make the universal star map appear in the air above them, all blues and whites and networks of stars so dense they look like the clouds Shiro used to stare at out the windows of his Garrison classroom.

The desert always made the most beautiful clouds.

It's the briefest ache for home, but it's enough. The sky full of stars shifts.

"Shiro?" Allura asks, and hearing his name in her voice again, even in this Allura's voice, hurts.

He looks up, and there's a single dot in the air – all the rest have faded away. He doesn't need to know Altean to recognize Earth, spinning in silence between them, reminding him of all the could-have-beens, of all the places he might have visited had he chosen not to make the same mistake twice. His mind took him home before he could, it seems.

"Yeah," Shiro says when he realizes that she's still waiting for a response. "Sorry."

"What a strange world," Allura says, pinching her chin. "Seventy percent ocean coverage. Breathable atmosphere." She pinches the air, and the orb spins, pulls out until the rest of the Solar System appears. "And it's not a binary system! Lit purely by a main-sequence yellow giant. Fascinating."

"We've been called worse," Shiro says. "This is my home."

"Our home," another voice says, and the bridge doors slide shut.

"Keith," Allura says, testing the name on her tongue, satisfied when nobody corrects her. "Aren't you supposed to be with the others?"

"The others," Keith says, sighing, "started throwing this disgusting green goo everywhere. They were hardly paying attention enough to notice me slipping away."

"I can see that," Shiro says. His attempt at a grin slides into a grimace. "Well, I guess I could use some help. I'm not very good at breaking bad news to people."

Allura's smile, as small as it may have been, evaporates. "Bad news?" she says – demands.

Shiro winces. "Since you asked," he says, and wills the ship's computer to display something else.

The neural map of stars explodes outward like a splash of rainwater on glass, drifts in a slow spin around them.

"The universe," Keith murmurs, stepping forward. He reaches out with a hand, tries to touch a cluster of galaxies that float by his head. "I didn't know it looked like this."

"It hasn't changed much in ten thousand years," Allura says. "At least I can take solace in its similarity."

There's a breath of pause, and Shiro lets his hands go slack on the controls.

"About that," he says.

The universe shifts red.

* * *

When Allura summons them all to the bridge, it's not Shiro she's angry at anymore.

"We need to move," she says, once the others return from the mess hall, chunks of green goo in their hair and smiles on their faces. But then they see Allura's eyes, see Keith's indifferent stare and Shiro's hands on the console and realize, all too late, that something's wrong.

"You were right," Coran says from across the room, hands working the controls for a different system. "There's a Galra capital ship heading straight for us. It'll be here in a few vargas."

Shiro's mouth thins to a fine line.

"A few what?" Pidge mutters under her breath, face scrunching up.

Shiro sighs, lets his fingers dig into the crystal underneath his hands. There's something that he's been waiting for – a sign that things haven't gone completely to hell. He'd been searching Allura's eyes all night, digging around outside of her mind, trying to break in. So far, though, nothing's come.

She doesn't recognize them. Not as paladins, at least. They're just intruders.

"We need to raise the castle's defenses," Allura says. "Obviously." She huffs, marching over to a dusty and vacant console opposite from Coran's, and for a moment, her eyes flash with duty instead of scorn.

Shiro's heart aches.

"What can we do to help?" Keith says. He's stepped forward, one foot on Shiro's raised platform and one not. Shiro jumps.

"Down in engineering," Coran says, tapping away at a screen, and a map appears in the air above them, "there's a power conduit that's been rusted over. Probably low-level; nothing too important. But it needs to be bypassed for the shields to go up."

"Show me how to do it," Pidge says, turning to the door, and when Coran beams and chases after her, Shiro's heart throbs some more.

"This isn't right," he mutters.

Keith looks at him out of the corner of his eye. "What's wrong?" he asks, voice like thin glass.

Shiro bites his inner lip. "This isn't right," he says again. "Something's missing."

Blue rumbles in the back of his mind.

Allura turns, sighs, wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. "I don't suppose you understand how to control this castle, do you?"

Shiro pauses. "No," he says, and it's not a lie.

She looks at him, raises an eyebrow, and nods. "Good," she says. "We need to take this slow."

"Um," Hunk says, raising a hand like he's still in class. "I don't know about you guys, but I seem to remember that funky mustache guy saying there was a capital ship on its way? Shouldn't we be, like, I don't know… taking things fast instead?"

"They're probably just on a scouting run," Allura says, waving a hand. "This castle has been here, dormant, for ten thousand years. If we stay quiet, they'll leave."

When Shiro turns to the rest of the team to gauge their reactions, his eyes meet Lance's.

Apparently it doesn't take being a bona fide time-traveler to know that Allura's plan wouldn't work. From the look in her eyes when Shiro looks back, she knows it, too.

"I think I'm going to go help Pidge," Lance says, smiling, offering them a small two-fingered salute. "Leave the planning to you guys."

Hunk blinks, rubbing the side of his mouth. "And I… uhh…"

"Go," Shiro says, giving them an apologetic smile. "We'll be here."

The ground shakes.

"The hell—" Lance shouts, stumbling forward, barely missing the dust and dirt falling from the high metal rafters. The lights flicker, half-on, half-off, then fall black and silent. The massive crystal hanging above Shiro sparks and pops, hissing, and arcs of bright-blue electricity bite out at the walls.

From outside the window, a bolt of red weapons fire bites into the Arusian ocean.

"Contact!" Allura hollers, and grabs hold of the console the moment another shockwave rocks across the castle. The lights come back on, but they're red and accompanied by the roar of an angry warning siren.

There's something tugging at Shiro's arm.

"We need to leave," Keith says, fingers catching at the fabric on his shoulder. He's speaking in a hushed whisper, and his eyes are cutting across the room at Allura. "This place isn't safe. We can take the lion and go home."

Another Galra laser zooms past the clouds, soars into the earth, tangles itself in the thin stretch of forest that lines the southern horizon.

"Their aim's getting better," Hunk says, voice wavering.

"How are they here already?" Lance asks. "Didn't you say it would be at least a few hours?"

"It would seem that Galra propulsion systems have improved dramatically over the past ten thousand years," Allura says. She forces herself upright, presses a command into her console.

The castle hums, power building and building and building. A thin veneer of energy coats the outer walls.

"Princess!"

Coran spins around the corner, uses his momentum to steady himself when the castle lurches to the side. Pidge is behind him, decidedly nowhere near as agile, and she clings to his arm as they stumble back into the bridge. The shockwave from another bolt of light slaps against the wide glass window above them, and the sirens wail louder.

"We ran out of time," Allura says, turning back to the console, stepping to the side when Coran runs up beside her. "I didn't have much other choice."

"It's alright," Coran says, tapping against another screen. "Pidge and I managed to get a conduit rerouted."

"It literally just needed to be plugged in again," Pidge says.

"It'll have to do," Allura says. The crystal whines above them.

"Power levels at sixty percent," Coran reads. "Seventy. Seventy-five."

"What's going on?" Keith asks. "Come on, guys. We need to talk to each other."

"We're going to get hit by Galra weapons fire," Allura says. An alarm wails from somewhere above them, and she slaps the side of her terminal with a fist. It silences. "We need shields. Now."

"Uhh, guys," Keith says again. There's a warning display in front of Shiro's face, one he's been ignoring.

Another blast from an ion cannon, bright red and angry and spitting fire as it cuts through the atmosphere.

"That one's going to hit us," Lance says. "Oh man, it's definitely going to hit us."

"Eighty-five!" Coran calls out. "Just a bit more!"

The crystal's whine turns feral.

"We need more power," Allura says.

"We need more time," Pidge says.

"Ninety!" Coran says.

' _To hell with it_ ,' Shiro thinks, and slams his palms into the controls.

* * *

Shiro had only left Earth's atmosphere nine times – the most recent of which was at the helm of a headstrong robotic lion.

He's left the atmosphere of an alien planet plenty of times before.

The crystal above him crackles and sparks, air hissing with heat and charged energy. There's a low rumble deep under the castle, but this time, it shakes from within.

The others fall forward, collapsing against walls and pillars with startled cries.

"What just happened?" Keith shouts over the roar of falling rock battering against the glass ceiling. "Did we just get hit?"

"No!" Allura yells, pulling herself upright, stumbling towards Shiro. "He's... how is he doing that? Coran-"

A wall of transparent screens appear above Shiro's head, each flashing through a sequence of green, garbled Altean text. He arches his neck, looks up, stares out the window at the laser-holes in the clouds.

"He's powering up the stardrive!" Coran says, reading over the console in front of him. "Princess! We need to do-"

The castle _lurches_. A spray of rock and dirt explodes outward from the jagged cliff-side like rain. From outside the glass, the forests are on fire. The sea boils. The air simmers from the heat of the castle's exposed reactors.

"Shiro!" Allura calls out. "The ship isn't ready for this kind of strain!"

The engines spool up. More shaking. More vibrating. The haze of displays in front of Shiro's eyes flicker and flash. The lights are on, and then they're off, and the sirens are screaming in his ears again. There's a pressure on his skull; there's a weight pressing into his shoulders and forcing him to his knees. But he locks them in place, holds his feet down against the stone.

The sky fades from blue to burgundy to black, from cool ocean mist to wine as dark as coal. The stars appear after Shiro blinks, and the only thing reminding him they were never always here is the firm grip on his arm.

He turns, looks Keith in the eye, has to remind himself that Keith wasn't always here, either.

There's another hand on his arm, then his shoulder, and then his throat, and it isn't until Keith vanishes behind a mop of white hair that Shiro reminds himself of everything else, too.

"What," Allura roars from under her breath, "did you do?"

For once, he's not intimidated. For once, he's sure. "I saved us," he says.

When Allura looks up, past the smoldering control boards and cracked walls, past the sets of confused, disoriented eyes, past the dust-soaked glass into space, she gasps.

Four lions stare back at her.

* * *

 **AN:** Thanks for reading! And for being patient.

Send my beta some love - her name's MaethoMixup and you can find a link to her on my profile!

Come scream about season 5 with me over on tumblr - username is EndoplasmicPanda!


	5. Keith

"We'll find them," Shiro says, but he knows it's a lie.

There's a chance, of course. There's always a chance. It's the driving force behind their rag-tag, motley arrangement of rebel forces fighting against the Galra, and it's what's kept them alive for so many troubled years. Shiro is no stranger to chance, and he understands more than anyone the power it holds.

Even still, as he stands in the central hangar of the Castle of Lions, the missing weight of two souls casts a heavy shadow over the crack-matted floor.

"We can't form Voltron," Allura says. "It's bad enough that we lost Pidge and Hunk, but…"

She stops herself before she can say something that's too true to be heard. Keith fidgets and crosses his arms, the fabric of his Marmora suit tightening underneath his clenched fingertips.

"We keep fighting," he says.

Shiro nods, turns his gaze to the floor. "We have to. And we keep looking, too."

Keith says nothing.

"There's also the matter of castle repairs," Coran says. He rocks back and forth on his heels. "The red lion's hangar is still very badly damaged, and the stardrive thrusters on that portion of the ship are irreparably damaged. If we had original Altean parts, we could maybe get it working again."

Shiro's Galra arm throbs at his side. He reaches over, rubs circles into the point on his bicep where flesh meets metal.

Keith's eyes trace the movement, but still, he says nothing.

"Then that's what we need to focus on now," Allura says, nodding, her eyes bright and piercing like starlight. "Castle repairs. Simple enough."

"Until then," Keith starts, freezing mid-sentence. His voice goes quiet – almost as though he regrets having to talk at all. "Where should I keep Red?"

A beat of silence settles between them like thick fog.

"She can't stay in the main hangar," Keith continues, forcing the words through his teeth. "Not anymore."

Shiro swallows. "I guess," he says, finally, "you can take one of the other lion's hangars. One of the empty ones."

"Temporarily, of course," Coran says.

Keith nods, eyes turned away. "Yeah."

More silence, just long enough to suck the air out of the room, and Allura uses that moment to smile at them both, eyes pinched shut. "Well then," she says, voice clipped like a wingless bird. "I'm going to go take care of some things."

She walks away, presses her fingertips along Shiro's arm as she passes, gives him a hollow look that he knows is her attempt at sympathy. Shiro stiffens at the touch, doesn't move until he hears the hangar doors slide shut.

Keith is still burning a hole in the ground with his stare.

"Where's Lance?" Shiro asks.

Keith's shoulders bob. "Probably still in his lion. He hasn't moved since we landed."

Shiro nods. "Yeah," he says. "I don't doubt that."

"He blames himself." Keith moves a hand up, cups the edge of his neck where Shiro knows there's a fading scar. "He's blaming himself."

Shiro purses his lips tight, looks away. "Yeah," he repeats. He shifts on his feet, moves his leg just enough to make a sound. "I should go talk to him."

But there's a sudden weight on his chest, a crushing pressure that's sucking the air out of his lungs and a mop of black hair digging sharp spikes into the exposed skin around his collar.

Keith sucks in a rough breath of air from around the breastplate of Shiro's armor.

"Keith," Shiro breathes, bringing his hands up. Keith's suit is cold and clammy underneath his touch, and when he pushes, lets Keith fall further into his arms, there's a part of Shiro's mind that reminds him it's how he feels, too.

* * *

Once again, Shiro finds himself as the unwanted center of attention for something that he wasn't even sure he'd done.

The battle lulls. The sea of stars in front of them stop spinning, and despite the fact the castle's alarm systems are still ringing in his ears, space seems too quiet somehow – like they'd been plunged into the deep end of an ocean.

"The lions," Allura murmurs, and Shiro's pulled back out.

They're there, in all their shiny, metal, alien glory – all four of the limbs of Voltron, hovering in a loose circle in front of the Castle's bridge window.

But they're not what Allura's staring at. She's turned, fixing him with a stare that's less angry and more confused than anything else.

A flash of bright blue light claws at the back of Shiro's eyes, and the shields flicker and hiss. The eye of the storm passes, and they're back in the firefight.

"Shields down!" Coran yells over the alarms. He twists an invisible dial, flicks an invisible switch, and the castle lights dim. "Diverting power!"

The air charges with dormant static, and time freezes. Shiro watches the thrusters in the base of each of the two hangars he can see fire up, watches the stars begin to drift. The castle is moving, sensing his hesitation through the pads of his fingertips.

A flash; a spark.

Silence.

Shiro blinks, and he's staring at the world through the front glass of the black lion. He blinks again, and he's looking at himself – his reflection staring back at him from the light of a nearby star. It's like a movie reel - Shiro feels like a specter, watching himself go through the motions of a post-battle cooldown from a perspective over his own shoulder.

There's the remnants of a recent firefight sizzling cold around him, and his image sighs in relief. Another finished battle. Time to go home.

His comms chirp in his ear, and Coran mutters something indistinguishable over the air. Shiro can't hear what it says, but he knows that it makes him smile. He hears the voices of the others, hears the quiet, calm warble of Keith's breath as he pants into his helmet. It's all static – lost to the memory Shiro realizes he's replaying in his head like a scratched, damaged record.

The lions form in front of him, dipping between shells of fallen spaceships, cutting through the stars like blades. It's just Keith and Lance, though – and the patterns they weave leave gaps wide enough for two others. A subconscious choice, born from habit, but not something Shiro can miss.

He feels himself frown, catches his heart fluttering out of rhythm in his chest. He remembers this mission now, stolen from a universe that didn't exist anymore. He remembers their frantic searching at the fringes of the galaxy. All they ever found were more Galra fighters, though.

The tail of Lance's lion clips an asteroid, and he spins to the side, sparks flying. Shiro hears Keith's voice, can't tell what he's saying, but he remembers all the same – it's a warning. Keep your head down, Keith had said. We don't know what might still be lurking out here.

The coil of white-hot anticipation in Shiro's chest starts to cut away at his flesh like molten metal melting through ice. He knows what's coming.

The castle is just ahead, a bright blue speck that grows larger and taller with each passing second. He sees the shield flicker down, just long enough for the others to pass through, and he hears Coran's voice again.

And then he slams into a destroyed Galra fighter. Or, at least, what he thinks is a destroyed Galra fighter.

He can't hear Keith's voice, but he can feel it – feel the way it slides through Shiro's skin and leaves him nauseous. Sorry, his lips move to say. Didn't mean to do that.

Something blasts past him, over his shoulder, cuts through the castle's lowered defenses. He forces himself to look, forces himself to remember, because the next instant he's standing on the bridge again, hands cutting into the crystal controls so hard they're cracking, watching the same thing happen again.

The laser from the Galra cruiser slams into the red hangar.

"Hit!" Coran yelps. The bridge shudders, metal superstructure underneath them moaning. "We've been hit!"

Sparks are flying from the control boards, the ventilation systems are spewing toxic, white steam into the air, and the stars are spinning, spinning, spinning out of control with the ship.

But Shiro doesn't notice any of that.

He's staring at the shallow hole in the red lion's hangar tower, even as his palms slip from the controls of the ship, even as he falls to his knees and slides to the floor, even as his eyes slide shut and he falls into restless sleep.

He dreams of black holes and unfinished wars - and for some reason, Keith is there, too.

* * *

Shiro wakes in a healing pod.

The castle is dormant, lights dim and room quiet. Shiro looks out through the fogged glass, fidgets in weightless limbo until his fingers start to tingle. A flash of panic rushes down his spine, and he gulps in a lungful of the pod's bizarre amniotic fluid.

The lights come on in a blur of blues and whites, and then Keith is there, actually there, staring at him from the other side. His mouth is moving, twisting into words, but Shiro can't hear them – can't hear anything but the rush of blood spiraling between his ears, or the pinch of his heart in his chest, or the sizzling, high-pitched hiss that sounds like a dentist's drill cutting holes into his brain.

The door to the pod flies open, and Shiro tumbles out, legs weaker than the jelly in his lungs that was never actually there at all.

But he never makes it to the floor. He hears a soft grunt underneath him, feels his chest connect with something firm, and then he's being hoisted upright again, held under the arm by Keith's shoulder and gloved hand.

"I've got you," Keith says, voice low and careful. He shifts Shiro's weight with a little sigh, grips him by the wrist. The lights flicker overhead, and Shiro twists his head to look up.

"What's going on?" Realization creeps back in. "Are we still under attack?"

"No, we're not," Keith says.

Shiro blinks. "What?" He fidgets, but Keith holds him tighter to keep him in place.

"Hey, calm down," Keith says. He takes a step forward, lets Shiro's body drape across his shoulders. "Let's get you to a chair."

Shiro swallows, lets out a rough breath, but puts up no resistance. He angles his neck and looks back at the chamber he'd just fallen out of. "Why a healing pod?"

"We honestly didn't know what was wrong with you," Keith says. "The princess said we should put you in a pod just to be sure, so we did." He tries to shrug, but it just comes out as a twitch of muscle.

Shiro smiles. "That bad, huh?"

Keith grunts, turns and settles Shiro into the low seat near the door. "What do you mean?"

Shiro's eyes stare at the palms of his opened hands. They still tingle, even the prosthetic, like they'd been frostbitten. He flexes his fingers. "I've been a mess, haven't I?"

Keith sighs through his nose, takes a step back, threads his fingers into the pockets of his pants and stands up straight. "We've all been messes. This whole aliens thing is a bit…"

"Nuts?" Shiro says, chuckling. "Yeah. You don't know the half of it."

Keith stands there for a moment, silent, doesn't do much more than look around the room from where he's rooted in place. "Castle's big."

"Yeah," Shiro says, and he watches Keith's frown, watches the way he twists his head away when he catches Shiro's eyes on him. All at once, Shiro realizes this is first time he's had the chance to speak to Keith – to really speak to him since he'd appeared in the desert less than three days before, but surprisingly, nothing substantial comes to mind.

He likes the silence, anyway. It's better than everything else they'd had to deal with.

"We should talk," Keith says, sensing Shiro's complacency. He fidgets, rubs his thumb against the corner of his shirt. "About before."

And they should. They should do a lot of things – rush to the bridge, jot down the notes from everything Shiro remembers about the past he's living twice, take their time to unwind and stretch into the roles that are sure to be set out before them soon enough.

But then Shiro remembers. He remembers the fact that they're not paladins – not yet, at least – and he remembers the fact that the lions came to them; not like before, where each paladin finding his or her lion was a quest in and of itself.

He remembers how long it's been since he's seen Keith at all - even this version of him, still so full of hope and innocence and curiosity. And he's here. He's still alive.

Shiro swallows, and for a moment, he starts to worry about the possibility of it all being fake again.

"You okay?" Keith's voice cuts in, all low and gristly and concerned. "Shiro?"

"Yeah," Shiro says, and he realizes far too late that he'd spaced out when Keith had asked him a question. He looks up and offers a small smile as penance. "You wanted to talk?"

Keith swallows, but shakes his head. "Later," he says, coughing. "I think the princess wants to talk to you first."

"She has a name, you know," Shiro says, wobbling back to his feet. "And I don't doubt it."

* * *

"Sorry for the quick thaw," Coran chirps, once Shiro had changed back into his normal clothes and followed Keith to the bridge as though he didn't already know his way there. "Had to divert a decent amount of power away from secondary systems to facilitate repairs – and that meant nixing the automatic wakeup system on the pods."

Shiro raises an eyebrow, looks behind him at Keith. "Is that why you were there?"

Keith twists his lips, shrugging. "Somebody had to let you out. May as well have been me."

Shiro sends him a bright smile. "Thanks," he says, and means it.

"Where's Allura?" Keith asks, turning away. He swallows. "She was around earlier."

"Princess Allura is doing some… much needed soul searching," Coran says. He turns to Shiro. "I'll let her know you're awake."

Shiro nods. "Thanks," he says again, and means that, too.

The bridge is dark and gloomy, but this time, there's no war all around them, nor are there spindly cracks running down the glass and metal buckled at the joints of the doors. It looks just like Shiro remembers, but now there are new scars, new gashes in the shiny white metal surface of the ship's outer hull, markings that weren't there on the other castle.

It's a strange feeling - one that Shiro can't exactly place. Contentedness? Confidence in his theory?

"Power's been spotty," Keith says, interrupting Shiro's train of thought. He's leaning against the far wall, watching the stars drift by above them. "We're in orbit around the planet, apparently. Had just enough energy left to do that much."

Shiro hums. "Where's everyone else?"

"Pidge and Hunk and Lance?" Keith asks, cocking his head. "They're asleep. Coran gave us all rooms to stay in for the time being, until we figure out what we're doing here and why this is happening."

It makes sense. This Allura knows as little now as they did when they arrived on the Castle of Lions the first time, ten-odd years prior.

"Yeah, about that," Shiro asks, crossing his arms. "What happened to the Galra ship?" He pauses. "What happened when I passed out?"

The doors to the bridge whisk open. "Shiro!"

Shiro takes a step back, spins around just in time to have Allura in his face again. Her eyes are wide, and her hands are tucked into loose fists at her sides. They're not angry fists, though – and that's the only thing that keeps Shiro from holding up an arm to block her from coming further.

"Allura." He sighs, standing up straight. Coran is there, too, but it's Allura's presence that commands the room's attention and dulls everything else. There are stains under her eyes, and her clothes are wrinkled.

She's shaking. Shiro can see it in the way her shoulders twitch under her hair.

"I don't know who you are," she says, "or who any of you are, or even what just happened, but…" She pauses. The tremor in her arms stops, and she deflates – just a little. "I suppose I ought to thank you."

Shiro blinks. "Excuse me?"

Allura reaches out, grabs him by the sleeve of his shirt – on his human side, he notes absently – and tugs him toward the front window. The vast expanse of space stretches out before them like an abstract painting, and when Allura points, finger cutting through the stars, it all at once becomes three-dimensional.

The planet Arus is beneath them, a bright blue dot that stretches from one end of the glass to the other. It drifts by as Shiro breathes, formations of clouds and storms and mountain ranges disappearing from view with each heartbeat.

But Allura isn't pointing there. "Look," she says. So Shiro does.

Far away, hung between the stars like Christmas ornaments, are four colorful shapes.

Four colorful shapes and a mess of destroyed, charred wreckage.

"They've never done this before," Allura says. Her voice is quiet. "In all the years I've been alive, and all the times I've seen the lions engage in battle, they have never done this before."

The light from Arus's star flashes across the Galra cruiser's jagged metal remains, and it bounces through the window of the bridge like a kaleidoscope. But then they're moving, and the castle falls into the shadow of the planet, and everything goes comfortably dark again.

"Are you Altean?" Allura asks. It's a quiet question – an admission of something she probably doesn't want to think about. Shiro jumps.

"What?" he says. Allura reaches up to pinch the tip of his ear. "Ow, hey!"

"You knew how to control the castle," Allura says. "It recognizes you as primary commander. And then this?" She points out the window at the mess of destroyed Galra machinery. "I need an explanation. Because otherwise there's a flaw in the security on this ship, and it needs to be dealt with."

The lights flicker; the sea of space outside the window seems to brighten somehow.

"Damn," Coran mutters. He's bent underneath a console, fiddling with wires, grumbling about wiring and mice and something else. "Must've shorted something."

"I'm not Altean," Shiro says. He run a tongue across his teeth. "I know as much as you do, I promise. But whatever it is that's happening, we'll get to the bottom of it."

"The lions only ever listened to my father," Allura whispers. "My father, and Zarkon."

Shiro's blood ices over. "I'm not him ," he hisses, and it's not until Allura steps back in surprise that he realizes how much malice was in his voice. Shiro swallows, takes a calming, steadying breath, and locks eyes with Allura's again. "And I'm not your father, either." A pause. "But hopefully I can be enough of a service to you and this castle to make him proud."

"I know," Allura says. "And he seems to think so, too."

Shiro frowns. "You talked to Alfor?"

Coran steps between them, propping his hands up on his hips and leaning forward onto his toes. "About that," he says. "Princess, we're going to have to be careful about using the hologram room for a while – at least until we figure out what's causing all of these strange power glitches."

"Didn't you say the ship was damaged back when we were still on the ground?" Keith says, and Shiro startles. He'd forgotten Keith was there at all, melting into the shadows farthest away from the door. "It could be that."

"Well, yes," Coran hums, cupping his chin with a gloved hand. "But this could just as well be a strange bug in the ship's computer systems. It's been ten thousand years since the last reboot, after all – who knows what could be going on in there?"

The low hum of the dormant castle dies. The lights go off entirely; not even the glow of the back-up system comes on like they had before. The engines fall silent in the aft of the ship, and all at once, space becomes as bright as the stars it was built from.

"Quiznak," Coran says. "There it goes again."

"We need to run tests," Allura murmurs, and Shiro can just make out her pacing silhouette in the dim shadows of the light from the night sky. "We have to. Just to be certain, of course, if you really are Altean or not."

"Is that necessary?" Keith asks. His voice is tight and defensive. "Shiro?"

"It's fine, Keith," Shiro says. He turns to where he expects Allura to be in the dark. "I'll do whatever you need me to do. Just say the word."

When the lights come back on and her eyes cut into his, they're not fierce with anger anymore. Instead, they're resolute.

* * *

He's given a room to sleep in, just like the others. Shiro notes, absently, that it's the same room he was assigned the first time, too.

"There's not much else we can do for the time being," Coran tells them, once they're assembled in the dining area after Shiro's settled himself into his new space. "We can't send you home until the castle is operational again, and that requires use of all of the lions - none of which have pilots or are even responsive at the moment. We'll just have to make due."

Pidge fidgets. "So you're saying we're stuck here?" She raises an eyebrow. "On an alien ship? With nothing to do?"

Coran gives her a bright, apologetic smile. "Afraid so."

She shrugs. "Alright. Not the worst situation to be in."

"I'm sure there's a way we can make ourselves useful," Hunk says. His eyes are scanning over the equipment in the kitchen behind them.

"It's not every day you end up stuck in outer space," Lance agrees, leaning against the dining room table. "Now we just have to make the most of it."

Keith snorts. "Yeah? What are you going to do, write sad poetry and stare out the window like a lost puppy?"

"They're called haikus!" Lance bites back, and Shiro realizes this is the continuation of a previous conversation the two must've had that he wasn't privy to.

"Those are poems, Lance," Pidge says, sighing, pushing herself off of the wall she'd been leaning against and walking toward the countertop where Hunk had begun chiseling away at a particularly menacing pile of food goo.

"They're Japanese poems!" Hunk calls from the kitchen.

"Whatever," Lance mutters. He turns and points an accusing finger into Keith's chest. "But if anyone here is more likely to be a mopey loser, it's this guy."

"Loser?" Keith says, raising an eyebrow and crossing his arms. "I beg your pardon?"

Shiro smiles.

"Hey, Coran," he says, loud enough to draw everyone's attention. "Didn't you say there was a training facility on this ship?"

Coran blinks. "I did?"

He hadn't, but it didn't hurt to tell a small white lie for the sake of team bonding, Shiro admits to himself with a grin.

"Well, no matter," Coran says, waving a hand. "There is indeed!" He turns to Lance and Keith, starts to walk them out of the room. "Shall I show you the way?"

Keith turns around, shoots Shiro a knowing, exasperated look, but lets the strange Altean man tug them into the hall and across the ship without argument.

"That was smooth," Pidge says, pulling a chair out from the table and sliding a less-than-appealing-but-moreso-than-before plate of food goo in front of her.

"Like herding cats," Shiro agrees, and crosses his arms. Pidge shovels a spoonful of food into her mouth, stops mid-chew, and stares at him. "What?"

"Are you okay?" she asks, and it's her tone of voice, the faded look in her eyes that reminds Shiro of their previous private conversation all the way back at the desert shack on Earth. "We really haven't had a break since… you know."

And she was right. This was the first time Shiro had a moment of peace since - well.

He swallows a gulp of air, purses his lips, turns away.

"I'm sorry," Pidge says suddenly, and she's standing up. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't've said anything. You were finally doing alright, and I went and screwed up because I had to go and run my mouth again." She gathers her plate in one hand, her utensils in the other, and makes for the door. "I'll leave you alone now."

"Hey, no," Shiro says, reaching out with a limp hand. "You didn't do anything wrong, Pidge. You were worried. I'm..." He scratches a fake itch on his cheek, lets a quiet laugh bubble up from his throat. "I'm touched. Really."

Pidge stares at him, looks past the frame of her glasses. "Well, alright," she says, but she still stands in the doorway, holding her food close to her chest.

"She's in the hologram room, if you were wondering," Pidge offers, chewing on her lip. "She's been in there a lot the past day or so. Won't let anyone in except Coran, but even then, I think he's starting to overstay his welcome, too." She shuffles her weight from one foot to the other. "You should talk to her. It might help. She seems to like you enough."

Shiro doubts that, but doesn't saying anything. Instead, he nods, gives Pidge a smile.

"I'll talk to her," Shiro says, and it's that thought, not the thought of the past, that makes Shiro tense the most.

* * *

He finds her in the hologram room, just like Pidge had said. The door had been locked, hallway lights dim and glowing red from lack of power, but when Shiro steps up, the castle hums in his ear, sighs down his neck, and the hallway comes back to life.

The doors slide open with a quiet swoosh of air and metal, and Allura's there, sitting in the middle of a dim room, talking to a tall man standing on a pedestal of light. The room is dark, as dark as the rest of the ship had been as Shiro made his way there, but when Shiro steps inside and lets the doors click shut with an electronic hiss behind him, the lights don't turn on for him.

Allura jumps and stands roughly, straightening out the fabric of her wrinkled dress. "Shiro," she says, clearing her throat when her voice doesn't come out as clean and sanitized as she most likely had hoped. The image on the hologram display flickers and fades, and the lights come back on in a slow build. "Is there something I can do for you?"

Shiro lets out a small breath through his nose and attempts a smile. "Pidge said you were in here," he says, hoping that would be enough. To be truthful, Shiro had no idea why he'd come - Allura was still tense and vulnerable from their arrival, and everything he had on his mind to discuss with her would, no doubt, make things worse.

He steals a look over her shoulder at the silent platform where Alfor once stood, and worries that he's taken away whatever refuge Allura had left in this world.

"Indeed I am," Allura says, and when Shiro looks back at her, she's averted her eyes, turning them down to the cold steel floor.

A thought sprouts in Shiro's mind, and he twists his mouth open to ask a question.

The room spins. The darkness fades from the corners of the rafters, the hardness bleeds from the ground, and everything is green , thin grass and bright flowers sprouting from the cracks in the plating of the walls.

Shiro blinks, and they're in a field. The question dies on his tongue.

"What?" Allura whispers, spinning to look behind her. The pedestal is still there, surrounded by lilac and roses, and the ceiling has faded to a pale blue. "How did you..."

Shiro snaps his mouth shut. He feels the castle whisper in his ear, and for a moment, he thinks it's smiled at him - read him like an open book.

"I did that," Shiro realizes, out loud, and Allura's sharp eyes snap up to meet his again. " I did that."

"Yes," Allura says, and her lips thin into a small frown. "But how did you know?" She takes a small step, lets the grass catch between her bare toes. "How did you know this place was important to me?"

Shiro turns, looks for the door over his shoulder. It's still there, tucked between two arched trees. "I don't know," he says. "I don't know how I did it, but... I did. And I don't know how I remembered this place at all."

Allura blinks. Her eyes light up. "Remembered?"

Everything goes completely black. The hum of the engine sputters and dies. Something across the ship groans, like metal grinding against metal, and there's a popping noise that bounces through the walls like a radiator's gurgle.

"Quiznak," Allura mutters. "These power outages are getting rather frustrating."

Shiro moves toward the door, raises a hand to the control panel, and waits for it to open for him.

It doesn't.

The lights in the ceiling flicker, like shadows dancing across the room. Something sparks and sizzles against the floor, like burning electrical wire, then stops - and the room is bathed in silence.

Shiro's gut twists. "Allura," he says, and he alarms himself with how authoritative his voice sounds.

"This never happened before," Allura murmurs beside him. She takes a step closer. "What's going on?"

The lights flash on again. For an instant, the hologram room is lit like daylight, and the field is still there, all green grass and blue skies. It dies as quickly as it had arrived, and the room is black again.

Shiro's eyes are sore, bright spots burning into his retinas. Something twitches across the surface of the platform from across the room, but Shiro can't tell if it's just his eyes playing tricks on him.

The lights come on. A bulb across the room pops and sparks. The lights go off.

Something is definitely on the hologram platform.

"Shiro," Allura says, voice low and cracked.

Another flash. Lights on. The field comes back, but this time, the colors are inverted and the floor looks like charred ash. The sky is red, dipped in blood, and the flowers are corpses. Lights off.

Shiro reaches out behind him and grips the door's controls with his Galra hand. It's throbbing, aching under his skin. He hears the metal and glass of the console warp underneath his fingertips.

The hologram platform sparks. A bubble of light appears in the middle. Shiro takes a step away, and his back collides with the solid metal of the locked door.

Lights on. Lights off. Too quick to tell what was there. Shiro is having trouble distinguishing what is real and what isn't, and nothing goes away when he blinks.

The bubble moves.

It drifts through the air, off the pad, hovers three feet off the ground. Each heartbeat inches it closer, and closer, until it's an arm's reach away from Shiro's face, held out of time and immune to the panicked rumble of Shiro's heavy breaths.

For an instant, just an instant, he feels like he can see his own eyes staring back at him, muddied in its reflection like thin ice on the surface of a pond.

It disappears. The room falls black again.

The ship lurches. Far away, the hum of engines rumbles back to life. The low lights from before come back on, slow and hesitant, and the door chirps behind his back, online again. Shiro sighs, lets his head tap against the cool metal.

"What was that?" Allura asks. She's standing next to him, hands clenched into fists. Her eyes are wide, and her brows are furrowed.

"I don't know," Shiro says. "But if we thought there was something in the castle before, we know for sure there's something in there now."

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

If the romance in this fic was a rusty gear, I hope this chapter was enough WD-40 to get things moving, lol.

Pour some out for my fabulous beta, **MaethoMixup!**

Let me know what you thought! (Come say hi on **Tumblr** \- username is **EndoplasmicPanda**!)


	6. Coran

It starts because they've got nothing else to lose.

Pidge is gone. So is Hunk. Allura is sick, and the bones in her cheeks jut out against her skin like fossils under loose dirt. Coran stays with her, keeps her company while she fades away; the castle has started to crumble around them, withering at the corners like loose paper held against flame.

Lance is Shiro's fault. All it takes is one botched pep-talk and a failed training session and Lance locks himself in his room, stolen away from the world and entrenched in his own thoughts.

And then there's Keith.

He's a mess at 30 – a sea of scars and wires and tangled hair. The skin on his legs is rough and charred from an explosion several hundred failed missions ago, and he's missing an arm – just like Shiro, save for the fact that it's cut off after the elbow and not quite as pretty to look at. (So he says, at least.)

But he's still there. When Shiro starts to realize he's losing himself, too, Keith is there to pull him out, to dust him off by the shoulders and push him back into reality.

When Shiro stays up late, staring at the stars, Keith sits next to him. When Shiro disappears into the black lion and pretends to tinker with the wiring under his chair, Keith is outside when he resurfaces to eat, buffing the same small corner of the red lion's paw with a dirty rag.

When Shiro spends eight hours running laps around the castle, lost in a spiral of thoughts that seem to sink further and further into panic with each loop around Allura's closed bedroom door, it's Keith that appears next to him, dressed in full running gear, and keeps him company for another hour.

(It's not until Keith is slowing down, Shiro's pace matching out of subconscious respect, that Shiro realizes the screaming agony in his legs and the cold-burning breath of raw fire on his tongue.)

When Shiro sits down at the table, eats a silent meal, Keith is there, too, reading memos and jotting notes in the margins in his quick, tight handwriting. There are never words. There never need to be.

He's always there. He's always there, until he isn't – and when Keith leaves him, dies in a plume of purple smoke and flame, a part of Shiro's heart - a part he doesn't want to pay any attention to - aches from the feeling of thinking he was worth something more.

* * *

"I'm running through the castle's mainframe as we speak, Princess," Coran says, tapping away at a console in the control room.

"You weren't in that room, Coran." Allura's fingers grip the edges of her flight suit. "That… wasn't right. There's something wrong about what's going on right now." She twists her hands. "Very, very wrong."

Coran nods, fusses with the corner of his mustache as the computer catches up with his commands. When it chimes a pleasant tune, he smiles, claps his hands, and turns to face Shiro again. "Well! While that's cooking, we can head back down to the infirmary and get your bloodwork done."

"Considering we're not going anywhere," Allura sighs, looking out the ship's front window, "it's important to stay focused."

"Alright, then," Coran chirps, straightening up. He gestures for the door.

Shiro rubs the back of his neck. "Let's do it, then. Wouldn't hurt anything to be sure."

The lights running along the floor of the castle's hallways flicker and twitch as they pass, as though triggered by some sort of hidden tripwire. Shiro takes each step with ginger care, worried that even the slightest movement out of place will send the room back into dark and ominous shadow.

"I've managed to isolate the power systems controlling the lights," Coran says from ahead of him, as if having read his mind. He frowns. "Life support, though, is still another story. Hopefully we can get moving again, and soon – otherwise we're going to run out of air fairly quick."

"How quick is quick?" Shiro asks. His stomach churns.

Coran makes a show of tapping out a series of numbers on his fingers. "I believe," he says, "eight of your Earth days, I think."

Shiro blinks. "It's that bad?"

"The castle has been dormant for a very long time," Coran says. "There are many things I haven't had the chance to repair yet – several parts of the castle are barely working at all. It's a miracle this old girl lifted off the ground in the first place."

Shiro winces. "About that."

"Oh, pshh," Coran says, waving a hand. "You don't know why that happened any more than we do. This old tech does some strange things when you let it sit for long enough." He shrugs. "If the castle wanted to use you to take off, there isn't much you could've said that would have convinced it to do otherwise."

"That's not exactly reassuring, Coran."

Coran shrugs again, stopping at a closed door in the middle of the hallway. When he raises his hand, taps a button on the console in the wall, it slides open. "As for why the castle decided to single you out over everyone else, however," Coran says, stepping inside and looking over his shoulder, "we can figure that out ourselves. Doesn't solve our problems, but it does answer some questions."

The room wakes from a restless slumber the moment Shiro steps inside, the light panels on the walls flickering on with each hesitant footstep. This medical room is different from the one with the healing pods – there are rows of specialized machines and measurement devices and a shelf stacked from top to bottom with test tubes and vials and locked, official-looking, white boxes.

Shiro remembers this room, if only vaguely. It was where Pidge had set up shop, all those years ago, stringing wires and cabling through the walls and connecting the rest of the castle up in a grid of machinery and controls that not even Allura understood. It's nearly unrecognizable in this form – a simple office with musty air and empty chairs.

"I don't exactly know what I'm doing," Coran says, poking at a large syringe sitting on the counter next to an operating table. "I suppose it won't hurt all that much."

"That's fine, Coran," Shiro says, watching the man play champion and puff out his chest in faux gravitas. He reaches over with his metal arm, grabs the familiar Altean device, pulls a clean test tube from an opened crate nearby.

"What?" Coran says, eyes bulging. "Are you just going to—"

Shiro stabs the needle of the syringe into the skin of his flesh arm. The vial turns a healthy shade of red. "How much do you need?" he asks, watching the tube fill with each pump of his heart.

Coran winces. "That should be enough," he says. "Don't need to drain yourself dry, now."

The needle comes free just as easily as it had entered, and he hands it off to Coran, grimacing, twisting the flesh around the open wound.

"Alright then," Coran chirps, striding across the room to a wall of displays and screens and sensors Shiro never bothered to understand. "It may be a while before we know anything, but I'll make sure everything's in order."

The ship sits silent around them, walls uncracked and unmarred and untainted with a history Shiro isn't excited to relive again. But there's also a promise in these walls – a promise that maybe something different could happen. That things could be better now.

Shiro is scared of the silence, because with the silence comes unwanted thoughts.

"Coran?" Shiro asks before he's realized it, voice small. He clears his throat.

"Yes?"

He stops, has to think of a question, but when one forms on his tongue, he realizes it was always there. Has _always_ been there.

"What do you think is going to happen next?"

Coran stops fiddling with the centrifuge-like machine and turns on his feet, fixing Shiro with a curious stare – something far too serious. "That's the question, isn't it?" he asks in kind. "We could very well be forced into battle with the Galra."

"Or?" Shiro asks.

"Or, we could end up stranded out here in the middle of space," Coran says, still smiling in that far-off way. It's uncanny. "And die."

"I'd prefer for that not to happen."

"I'm sure," Coran says, winking.

Shiro frowns. "But… I'd also prefer for the alternative to not happen, either."

"Sometimes we don't have that luxury."

Shiro swallows. "Sometimes we do."

* * *

"Actually, the castle's systems aren't too difficult to interface with," Pidge is saying when Shiro returns to the common area, laptop propped against her raised legs. She lifts it with a pinky finger. "You guys are really lucky I managed to bring this thing with me."

"Honestly, Pidge, if anyone could have figured out how to do it without a computer, it'd be you," Lance says, with startling honesty. So much so, it seems, that it startles him, too.

"Wow," Pidge says, blinking wide behind the rims of her glasses. "Thanks, Lance. Genuinely."

"Sometimes he forgets what the difference between thoughts and speech is," Hunk tells Allura, who nods understandingly. "We're lucky this time it wasn't something gross."

"Hey! I'm more than capable of being a polite gentleman." Lance puffs up his chest. "Isn't that right, Princess?"

Allura blinks, leaning toward Hunk. "You're right. We are lucky."

Keith is the first to notice Shiro's return. He stands in one motion, pushing away from the couch as if shocked. "How'd it go?" he asks. It must have been the first time he'd spoken in some time, because the rest of the room turns to watch.

"Fine," Shiro says. He rubs behind his head, wincing through a fake smile. "Coran's running the blood as we speak."

Keith holds eye contact for a heartbeat, two heartbeats, then flinches. He doesn't say anything else. Maybe he'd forgotten to think of something else.

"We're in the process of trying to diagnose the ship's computer," Pidge says. "Allura's been helping me figure it out, but it's slow-going."

"We're making progress," Allura says, smiling in the pinched-off way Shiro knows means she's uncomfortable. So they weren't getting anywhere, then.

"Can I help?" Shiro asks, stepping into the room, pressing his hand into Keith's shoulder as he passes. The motion is instinctual – something benign and thoughtless and borderline accidental. They both freeze at the contact, sharing a hasty glance before Shiro peels himself away, moving just that much faster.

Not now, Shiro tells himself. Not yet.

"Not really," Pidge says from over the rim of her glasses. "Unless you all of a sudden understand complex crystal matrix memory storage algorithms."

Shiro smiles. "Sorry, I'm fresh out of that."

"Well, he _was_ flying this ship around like a fighter jet just a few hours ago," Hunk says. "And before that, he piloted the blue lion to get us here in the first place. Maybe he knows something, but just doesn't know it yet."

"That doesn't make any sense, Hunk," Lance says.

"No." Allura stands. "That does make sense. A lot of the castle's functions are performed through a link to the pilot's quintessence." She reaches across the couch and grabs a glass tablet, half-hidden behind Lance's thigh. "Maybe try this?"

Shiro takes the tablet after Allura yanks it away and ignores Lance's yelp of surprise. "I don't really know what to do with this."

He never had very good luck with learning the Altean language. Well, no – that's a lie. What little he'd understood he understood well, but the time restrictions from constant battle forced him to compromise. When Allura hands him the tablet, shows him how to turn it on as though he didn't already know the way by heart, he tries his best to hide his shock from how much he _did_ remember. He slides into an empty seat on the smaller couch across from the others, letting his mind wander.

"So what about that whole 'not dying from asphyxiation' thing?" Hunk asks, once Allura settles back down into her previous seat and leaves Shiro to his own devices. "How's that coming along?"

"We're working on that, too," Pidge says, not looking up. "Trying to kill two birds with one stone here."

"I'm sorry," Allura says. "'Birds'?"

"Flying things. Small. Have feathers." Pidge shrugs, fingers still dancing across her keyboard. "You know. Birds."

"Fascinating," Allura murmurs.

"Earth is full of all sorts of fascinating stuff," Lance says. He leans back on the couch, props up a leg on his knee. "You'd probably really like it."

"I'm sure I would," Allura says.

"The food? To die for." Hunk smiles a dopey smile. It falls off his face as quickly as it'd appeared, twisting into something crestfallen and realistic and far too painful for Shiro's peripheral vision to handle. "Well. That's not to say I've tried much else _outside_ of Earth, but you know what I mean."

"Allura," Pidge says, "what in the lower levels of the ship might draw a prolonged amount of power?"

Coran answers in Allura's stead, reappearing in the doorway. "If it's not the engines, then maybe the shield generator?"

"The shields, if I've read this right" –Pidge buffs a scratch on the surface of her screen with the fabric of her long sleeves— "don't run at full power all the time, only when they're needed. And the engines weren't running, either."

"How long of a time frame are we talking here?" Keith asks, voice quiet.

Pidge puffs out her cheeks, letting the air in her lungs escape with one violent huff. "I don't understand the Altean time system, so I can't be sure, but it looks like a long time."

"Days?"

"Thousands of years."

"Sorry, what?" Coran asks.

"Thousands of decaphoebes," Shiro translates absentmindedly. He continues to poke at his screen, only looking up when he realizes nobody else is talking.

They're all staring at him.

"How did you know that?" Lance asks.

"I don't know," Shiro lies. "Just came to me."

The power dies again in a whir of failing machinery.

The lights running along the walls vanish, leaving the room half-baked in the lime-green glow of Pidge's computer screen. Altean characters flash across the surface of her glasses until she props the laptop display backwards and forces it forward, letting its light fall over the rest of the group.

"What now?" she says. "Can't access the computer while it's down like this. I'm probably going to have to start all over again, too, once it reboots."

"What are you saying?" Keith asks.

"I'm saying," Pidge says, "that we're back at square one."

Something moves across the room. It's a rustle – a tremor in the back of Shiro's mind, something that trickles down his neck and pools somewhere on his spine.

There's a light. It's a flash, a flicker, the whiff of a candle before it's blown out. It's blue, like stardust, suspended in the darkness of a powerless castle. It's there, in front of the common room door, filling the space Coran had just been in.

It moves. Pidge's laptop screen flickers.

"What?" Lance mutters. "What is that?"

Shiro's gut stiffens. The temperature in the room drops. The light disappears, vanishes, reappears three feet closer. Strips of blue peel away from the center like glitched paper, fade into a cloud of icy dust.

The castle's lights flash on for a moment, and the ventilation fans – what few of them Coran had managed to get working on emergency power – spool up with a mechanical whine inside the walls. It's trying. The castle is trying.

But it's dead again another heartbeat later, another breath. The ship stays cold and silent. The _thing_ is still there, hovering in perfect stillness, looking like a tear in the fabric of reality.

"What are you?" Allura says, her voice piercing the darkness despite how much it shakes. "What do you want with us?"

The thing does nothing.

"It looks like a cloud," Pidge says. "A glitched-out cloud."

Silence. The ship is eerie when silent, like a piece of space folded in on itself. It's unnatural. Uneven. Incorrect.

The cloud moves again, disappears and reappears six inches from Shiro's face.

The room erupts into shouting. Shiro doesn't flinch.

There is something odd about the cloud. It doesn't fear him. It looks at him out of a sense of curiosity, a sense of surprise, almost as though there is something wrong with Shiro and not the other way around. There's a thought swirling around the center of the cloud's mind, a thought that says there's been a mistake. That this wasn't supposed to happen. That there was a problem, things weren't supposed to go this way, why was _he_ here and not—

He only realizes after Allura's hands light up silver-blue in dormant Altean rage that he's crumpled to his knees, breath coming out in sharp bursts.

"Get out of here," Allura seethes through a gap in her clenched teeth, face covered in inverted, self-made shadow. Her hands warp the air around them, magic as hot as her stare, as blue as the cloud.

The _same_ blue as the cloud.

The lights come back on. The ventilation fans whir back to life. The heat starts to return to the corners of the room. The seven of them are all still, shell-shocked, frozen on their seats. Shiro lets his backside fall flat on the floor.

The cloud is gone.

There's a heartbeat where nobody says anything. Another heartbeat where they all unfold, unclench, resort themselves on the couch. Remember to breathe. There's more silence, but this time, it's right. It's natural.

"Nice work, Allura," Coran says. "That thing was really giving me the quibblies."

Allura's eyes are wide, and she's still staring at the spot on the floor in front of Shiro's crooked, prostrate body as if the cloud were still there. "I didn't do any of that," she says, voice quiet, still unmoved. "It left on its own."

Lance leans forward, the crease in his brow far too familiar to the old Lance from Shiro's past. From Shiro's future. "Allura?"

"I couldn't stop it," she whispers. "It was Altean magic, whatever it was. And I couldn't stop it."

* * *

Shiro decides a walk is the only thing that would keep him sane, but halfway down another unblemished corridor and through another unjammed door, he starts to realize maybe that was a bad idea.

He finds himself in a quieter part of the ship, where the lights grow dim. The lion hangars each stretch off in different directions in front of him, offering him a choice – a choice on which he can't concentrate.

So he slides to the floor, lets his back press against the wall, forces the crown of his head against the cold, alien metal like it might swallow him up and let him forget where he was or what was happening.

This was painful. This hurt. Seeing everyone again is another thing, but there's a feeling caught in Shiro's throat that makes him suspect all of this is _his_ fault.

"Hey."

Shiro opens his eyes, unaware he'd closed them in the first place, and pivots his head just enough to see Keith standing there, arms crossed over his jacket and burning a hole in the floor with his stare.

Shiro smiles. "Hey."

Keith goes through the motions of internal conflict in only the way he knows how, with clenched fists and furrowed brows and hesitant silence. Shiro watches him out of the corner of his eye with a fond sense of understanding, lets Keith work up the nerve himself, does nothing more than press his back against the wall and wait.

Finally: "Can I join you?"

Shiro opens an eye and smiles wider. "Yeah."

Keith's footsteps are damn near silent. He settles against the opposite wall, folds his legs up halfway to his chest, props his wrists against his knees and pretends to pick at a sliver of invisible thread between his fingertips.

"So," Shiro says.

Keith's jaw knots. "So."

Shiro closes his eyes again, letting the quiet hum of the castle soothe him through their shared points of contact. His mind wanders, splits into four parts, and he's sitting there, lost in his thoughts, when Keith speaks again.

"You're ignoring me," Keith says. It's not an accusation, nor is it a question. It's a fact. Like the weather, or like their circumstance.

Shiro opens his eyes. Keith still isn't looking at him.

"I'm not ignoring you." It's a lie. They both know it. "It's complicated," Shiro adds instead.

Keith is silent. Shiro swallows around the lump in his throat and sighs.

"It's not your fault," he says. "This is my problem. I need to fix it."

"Why are you always treating me like a child?"

Shiro freezes.

"You don't trust me," Keith continues, pushing himself back to his feet. "Something happened after you disappeared. Don't do this to yourself, Shiro. Don't shut me out."

"I'm not trying to shut you out," he says, scrambling upright, gripping the corner of the hallway with a mechanical hand to steady himself. "It's complicated. I need time."

Keith stops mid-stride. "Why?" he asks. "Why does it take time to decide whether you need my help? Whether you _want_ my help?"

A bubble of anger – no, of frustration – crawls its way up Shiro's throat. "Because I'm not the Shiro you think I am," he says, voice sharper than he had planned. The words leave an unpleasant taste on his tongue; they're the first thing from this world that feels the most like the old one.

Keith turns around. His expression makes Shiro ache. "I don't care," he says. "Don't you get it? I don't. You left. Now you're back. What difference does it make what happened in between?"

Shiro narrows his eyes. "Keith."

"I know," Keith says, wincing. "I know. I just…" He runs a hand through the fray of his hair. It's shorter – shorter than it was before. Shorter than it would be in the future. The not-future? Shiro winces, too, nearly misses the next words out of Keith's mouth. Figures – he's given the chance to do everything over, and he _still_ fixates on the past. "I missed you."

Whatever remained of Shiro's frustration evaporates, leaves him through his toes, sucks him dry of whatever energy he had left. Now, he's just tired. So tired.

"I missed you, too," Shiro says, quietly, and watches Keith leave.

* * *

"We've got something," Hunk says the moment Shiro steps onto the bridge. He's standing off to the side, arms crossed, expression marred with something short of nerves.

The lights are still dim, and the consoles are still offline, but Pidge has apparently taken up residence at an empty station and propped her laptop across the dead Altean computer screen. She's not using it, though. She's not in the room at all.

"Where's Pidge?" Shiro asks, spinning in a loose circle, trying to see if he'd missed her somewhere.

"She's, uh, running back to the common area," Hunk says. "She needed to get something."

"And the others?"

"They're with her."

Shiro looks around the room. "Alright, then. What have you found?"

"Something in the ship," Hunk said. "It's a synthesizer of some kind. Kinda like the computer from Star Trek? But instead of making 'tea, earl grey, hot', it's doing something else."

"And you think that's what's causing that" – Shiro gestures vaguely – "cloud?"

Hunk scratches his forehead. "It's the best lead we've got right now."

"So that's why Pidge is gone?"

The doors open.

"No," Pidge says, holding a familiar tablet in her hands. Allura stands behind her, skin white as a snow. She's staring at Shiro, looking at him like he didn't exist. Like he _shouldn't_ exist.

"What's going on?" Shiro asks.

"I wanted to get your tablet," Pidge says. She fidgets in place. "I figured maybe you had something interesting on there? That maybe you'd figured something out?"

"Do you really think Shiro could have done something like that?" Hunk asks. Shiro looks at him, and he shrugs. "Sorry. Didn't mean it to come out that way. But you know what I mean."

"Honestly, no," Pidge says, stepping into the bridge. She shoots Shiro an apologetic smile. "No offense."

"None taken," Shiro says, watching Pidge slide into her seat. "I don't know the first thing about Altean tech."

"Yeah?" Pidge says, spinning around until she's pointed at him. She arms herself with the tablet, turns it on, points it outward. "Then why is it you wrote two hundred lines of the castle's base code in perfect Altean? And why does it just so happen to be _exactly_ what we need to get the castle working again?"

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Thank you for reading!

As always, thank you so much to my beta, **MaethoMixup**. Her link is in my profile.

Come say hello on Twitter! My username is **EndoWrites**.


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